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  • An American Heroine in the French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake
  • M. R. D. Foot
An American Heroine in the French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake. Edited by Judy Barrett Litoff. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8232-2581-X. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Index. Pp. xxxviii, 270. $29.95.

This is a tale of quiet heroism, most of it in the heroine's own words, of [End Page 260] an American girl, a doctor's daughter born in Ohio and brought up in Florida. She married a Frenchman whose mother was English; was with him in Paris when the world war against Hitler began; and stayed with him when he started to help the "Comet" escape line, in which she became a courier. By mere bad luck, she was arrested by the Germans in western Normandy in mid-June 1944 in the company of an evading American airman; and just managed to survive Fresnes and Ravensbrueck. She kept a diary, till she was arrested, which is here reprinted. In the winter after her rescue, she wrote a long account of her prison and concentration camp experiences, in the form of a letter to her recently dead mother. The original memoir seems to have vanished; this too is reprinted, from a typescript in the family's hands. More than sixty years on, both documents have a ghastly immediacy: they bring back Hitler's war at its worst.

The diary has been neatly edited by Professor Litoff, who also writes a long introduction; she footnotes events, well known at the time, which may not be readily remembered by today's readership. It presents a straightforward picture of life under Vichy France for someone who disliked it. The male SS guards left most of the immediate care of the prisoners to kapos, who were prisoners themselves. Woman's inhumanity to woman has seldom been as well described: witness the Polish woman kapo, without whose say-so no captive could reach the camp hospital, who kept an iron bar to hand with which she used to strike every other prisoner who came within arm's reach, as she did not want to catch their lice. In the closing stages, several hundred captives were crammed together in a vast marquee, most of them suffering from dysentery and many of them unable to stir to the latrine to relieve themselves. The stench alone must have been all but unbearable—yet they bore it.

Virginia Lake's private motto was "never give in": she hung on. Efforts by her American family eventually got through to her, just in time. She and General de Gaulle's niece, Genevieve Anthonioz, were removed from Ravensbrueck to Liebenau near Lake Constance, in a six-day nightmare journey through ruins, late in February 1945. There she slept in sheets, was decently fed, was out of earshot of gunfire, and was liberated late in April. She was reunited with her husband in Paris after the war's end; she recovered her health, they had a son and settled near Dinard. The British gave her an MBE, the Belgians the Medal of King Leopold, and the French the Liberation Medal of Honor, a croix de guerre, and, eventually, the Legion of Honour. She died in 1997 aged eighty-seven.

She had simply done what she thought she ought to do. Her story, movingly well told, was well worth putting into print.

M. R. D. Foot
Nuthampstead, England
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