Village of Secrets, Caroline Moorehead
Village of Secrets, Caroline Moorehead
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Village of Secrets
Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

Author: Caroline Moorehead

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 13 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 10/28/2014


Synopsis

“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 full for the first time.Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardèche, one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Eastern France. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of this tiny mountain village and its parishes saved thousands wanted by the Gestapo: resisters, freemasons, communists, OSS and SOE agents, and Jews. Many of those they protected were orphaned children and babies whose parents had been deported to concentration camps.With unprecedented access to newly opened archives in France, Britain, and Germany, and interviews with some of the villagers from the period who are still alive, Caroline Moorehead paints an inspiring portrait of courage and determination: of what was accomplished when a small group of people banded together to oppose their Nazi occupiers. A thrilling and atmospheric tale of silence and complicity, Village of Secrets reveals how every one of the inhabitants of Chambon remained silent in a country infamous for collaboration. Yet it is also a story about mythmaking, and the fallibility of memory.A major contribution to WWII history, illustrated with black-and-white photos, Village of Secrets sets the record straight about the events in Chambon, and pays tribute to a group of heroic individuals, most of them women, for whom saving others became more important than their own lives.

About Caroline Moorehead

Caroline Moorehead is the New York Times bestselling author of the Resistance Quartet, which includes A Bold and Dangerous Family, Village of Secrets, and A Train in Winter, as well as Human Cargo, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. An acclaimed biographer, she has written for the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. She lives in London and Italy.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David on September 19, 2014

Village of Secrets is a long and often complex book about how the people of the mountainous area of the south Massif Central in France helped to protect the Jews from the Nazis and helped many of them to escape to safety. It is so thoroughly researched that it is just about the book's only weakness t......more

Goodreads review by Lewis on November 08, 2018

The story of Chambon is incredibly moving ... my wife and I had the experience of visiting the village and feeling the powerful sense of "goodness" which still resides there. This town, in a remote part of France, led by the Huguenot pastor Andre Trocme, was the place of refuge for perhaps 2500 Jewi......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on October 15, 2014

here's how far behind I am -- I finished this book the end of last month and am just now getting to it here. aarrghh! Village of Secrets begins with the coming of the Nazis to France in 1940 and the establishment of the Vichy government under Pétain. It wasn't long until measures of repression agains......more

Goodreads review by Lewis on May 19, 2018

I have read the sections of this remarkable account which pre-date the activities in Chambon ... a series of French Catholic and Protestant leaders resisted the Nazi demands to collect and deport Jews ... eventually, they realized that saving all the Jews was impossible and they chose to focus on th......more

Goodreads review by Richard on February 09, 2016

This is not the first time that an author has told the story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon - an Alpine French community that was among those that hid Jewish children and adults during the Second World War, but it is the first account I have read. Caroline Moorehead is intent on correcting what she sees a......more