Word: pryce
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plans for the 1000-year Reich. As a civic entity and as individuals, they had to make choices--between collaboration and resistance, between survival and honor. These choices, along with the grander cultural confrontation between German and Frenchman, are the subjects of Paris in the Third Reich, by David Pryce-Jones. The book combines a selective narrative history of the years 1940-1944, a section of interviews with characters who saw the occupation from widely differing perspectives, and a collection of photographs of everyday life in that period...
...Pryce-Jones spends pages describing the structure and leading personalities of the Nazis' puppet government in Vichy. Although Henri Philippe Petain and the other chief collaborators spent much of their time outside of Paris, their influence and the attractiveness of their arguments were felt throughout the crippled capital. "It is with honor and in order to maintain French unity, a unity that has lasted ten centuries, and in the framework of the constructive activity of the new European order, that today I am embarking on the path of collaboration," Marshal Petain told Hitler in October 1940. Not only...
...hypocrisy of submission and the personal deceit practiced by Petain and his ilk. Once the Jewish extermination program was in place in 1942, the Vichy leaders had increasing difficulty explaining that concern for France justified an alliance with Hitler. Picking through conversations between Pierre Laval and Wehrmacht representatives, Pryce-Jones proves that Vichy cooperation went beyond facilitating the deportation of Jews. Laval knew that there were no "labor" camps at the end of the German train lines, but that did not concern him. His only thought was to use the twisted German racial ideology as a bargaining chip...
...photographs compiled for Pryce-Jones by Michael Rand, art director of the London Sunday Times, include few dead bodies or bleeding babies. What you see are storm troopers touring the Eiffel Tower, young couples flirting in the streets of Mesnilmontant, and an old woman, who wears a yellow star, hurrying down the rue de Rivoli. People lived, some very normally, through all of those years. Most, like that old woman, probably never conceived of battles on the Eastern front, or Auschwitz. It is with Rand's pictures and a group of excerpted interviews that the author paints his truest protrait...
...contrast, there were those who chose to fight, knowing the danger of their actions, and others who really had no choice. Pryce-Jones buries his own description of the resistance movement and the Jewish community under a mountain of detail. He is unfortunately fascinated by the various underground groups and their foes in the German and Vichy hierarchy. But the heroes speak well enough for themselves...