Historians agree: the diary of Leon Werth (1878-1955) is one of the
most precious-and readable-pieces of testimony ever written about
life in France under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Werth
was a free-spirited, unclassifiable writer, the author of eleven
novels, art and dance criticism, acerbic political reporting, and
memorable personal essays. He was Jewish, and left Paris in June
1940 to hide out in his wife's country house in Saint-Amour, a
small village in the Jura Mountains: his short memoir, 33 Days
recounts his struggle to get there. Deposition tells of daily life
in the village, on nearby farms and towns, and finally back in
Paris, where he draws the portrait of a Resistance network in his
apartment and writes an eyewitness report of the insurrection that
freed the city in August, 1944. From Saint-Amour, we see both the
Resistance in the countryside, derailing troop trains, punishing
notorious collaborators-and growing repression: arrests, torture,
deportation, and executions. Above all, we see how Vichy and the
Occupation affect the lives of farmers and villagers and how their
often contradictory attitudes evolve from 1940-1944. Werth's ear
for dialogue and novelist's gift for creating characters animate
the diary: in the markets and in town, we meet real French peasants
and shopkeepers, railroad men and the patronne of the cafe at the
station, schoolteachers and gendarmes. They come off the page
alive, and the countryside and villages come alive with them. With
biting irony, Werth records, almost daily, what Vichy-German
propaganda was saying on the radio and in the press. And we follow
the progress of the war as people did then, day by day. These
entries make interesting, often amusing reading, a stark contrast
with his gripping entries on the persecution and deportation of the
Jews. Deposition is a varied, complex, piece of living history, and
a pleasure to read.
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