March 6, 2004
MarkBernstein.org
 

Marianne in Chains

A review of everyday life in the French countryside under the Occupation. Gildea shows, in great detail, how life went on after the defeat, and how quickly people strove to forget that life after the end of the War. Of particular interest is the difference, after the war, in the way Jews and other outsiders were remembered: in the late 40's, their memory was erased and their former presence forgotten, but once the children of the war grew up the Holocaust, not the Resistance, became the defining memory of the war.