Against the Nazi war machine -- The Fortress #WWII #historical #resistance

By Madeleine Romeyer Dherbey (Guest Blogger)
 
Thanks for hosting my tour, Lisabet, and for your question: Why did I choose WWII as the period for the book?

I was born in a small village nestled under the Vercors cliffs, an area that saw a lot of action during WWII. It was where a couple of dreamers envisioned a plan to build an army of resistants that would support Anvil, the Allied landing on the French Mediterranean coast.

I grew up there long after the liberation, on the wrong side of glory. Three of my uncles were condemned to death for collaborating with the Vichy government and betraying C2, a Resistance camp located at Malleval, to the Nazis. Their sentences were later commuted to forced labor, but the national disgrace verdict stood, and they had to leave the area to avoid being murdered. Despite the death threats, my father— who had fought with honor during the war—decided to stay. The legacy, hard to overcome in a community mauled by four years of occupation and violence, is my first personal connection to this story.

Then, there is the Vercors itself. Breathtakingly beautiful, dangerous, a natural playground for all extreme sport lovers. Rock climbing, canyoning, spelunking, skiing, it’s all there. But for me, it’s home. It’s where my ancestors have lived and are buried, under those same cliffs.

It is a battle well-known to Historians and military strategists that got surprisingly little artistic treatment. The Fortress is a dream of freedom, a heroic battle, a military disaster, but also redemptive last stand. Many books have been written on the subject, but no fiction, and in fact, I was frustrated by the dryness of the accounts which I felt did not reflect the human dimension of that battle.

There are also small things, like a Sten machine gun I found in the mud of a summer creek, with this inscription, Pour ma Suzon Cherie, June 12, 1944; or the story of a fifteen-year old boy, a resistant fighter whose name is forgotten, who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in the summer of 1944.

I wanted to do justice to the conflicting truths of men, women, families, rivals, religions, collaborators, communists, nationalists and simple French patriots during the Nazi occupation of my beloved Alp mountains. The plot is simply a way to let them speak for themselves.

But there in the middle of my noble historical mission, a love story was born, and once it took roots, it drove the narrative. Marc has pledged his life to defend the Vercors, and he is a man of his word. It is with genuine distress that he discovers his growing attraction to Alix, and he fights it. The tension that builds between them, driven by irrepressible feelings and conflict, is shaped by the violence that unfolds around them, rather than superficial sexual drama. That love story made the writing almost hypnotic for me. 
 

Six weeks before D-Day, a thousand kilometers from the beaches of Normandy.

There are no generals in the French Vercors, just a handful of men and women against the Nazi war machine. They come from Bretagne, Paris, and Slovenia, and the villages up on the cliff. They are the Fortress.

Blurb

The war has not made much of difference in Alix’s life. Her father has seen to it that she grows up unaware, unworried, but safe in her tiny village under the cliffs of the Vercors. All around her he has built a fortress whose walls are impregnable—until the 27th of April, 1944. That day he makes a stupid mistake up on the cliff, and the walls of the Fortress start crashing down. Reality breaks into Alix’s life with unrelenting violence, unforeseen possibilities. From now on, every decision she makes will mean life or death.

Excerpt

“Honey, if anybody’s looking for it up here, it means you’re already dead. So it won’t matter to you. Listen now. People will call you on the other phone, the one downstairs, and give you coded messages. As a rule it will be about movements in our direction, Germans, Militia, or even new recruits for our camps. Remember, the security of Mortval depends on you. Here is a list of codes. You must memorize all of them and get rid of the list.”

She started to read. “The strawberries are in their juice. Your walnuts were wormy. You can’t put rabbit in the cassoulet.” She looked up. “Are they all about food?”

“No. Read the next one.”

“Yvette préfère les grosses carrottes. Well?”

“Well, it’s not about food.”

“Yvette préfère… Oh. I understand now. Did you come up with that one?”

“I thought it would be memorable.”

“It’s lovely. I bet the British are impressed.”

About the Author

Madeleine Romeyer Dherbey was born in the French Alps, moved to the United States twenty-five years later, and currently lives in the mountains of Virginia with her husband, two daughters, and Mikko.

Website

www.MadeleineRomeyerDherbey.com

FaceBook

https://www.facebook.com/Madeleine-Romeyer-Dherbey-2067077286871927/?modal=admin_todo_tour

Madeleine Romeyer Dherbey will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter

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The Principle of Love

By R.A. Padmos (Guest Blogger)

The Bookshop tells the story of a Dutch bookseller, Jakoba Huyzen. Although the timeline stretches out over most of the twentieth century, the occupation of Holland by the Nazis lies at the centre of Jakoba’s memories. It’s probably not that hard to imagine the impact those five years had on the people who were alive at that time. Even if we realise that for some it were years of unimaginable suffering while others simply went on with their daily business, all had to make some hard moral choices. To resist the Nazis came at a price, but so did doing nothing. Many German soldiers were decent guys, but they were still part of an army that fought for a criminal state. Of course Jews were our neighbours, but should we be expected to offer them a place to hide if it meant that our own children risked losing their parents?

Jakoba first and foremost sees what connects her with other people, not what makes them different. Her staunch refusal to consider people as anything other than complicated individuals who should never be judged solely by their sex, religion, sexuality or nationality doesn’t change simply because it’s war. Her circle of friends is as eclectic as the books she sells in her shop. It’s for that reason that she sees no contradiction in helping Jewish friends and her love for German propaganda photographer Armin. To her both forms of love are closely connected and she stubbornly refuses to allow herself to step outside her own philosophy about right and wrong. If a price has to be paid, then let it be so.

About The Bookshop

Even I, who had resisted kicking and screaming, had to admit defeat. Why would love be impressed by the protests of a simple bookseller?

Jakoba has had enough. It is 1999 and she looks back on her life that began at the start of the century. Her arrival was unexpected, but joyfully welcomed, by her middle-aged parents. In a time where a middle-class girl has one destiny, namely to become a wife and mother, Jakoba is allowed to start working at a bookshop. Books become one of the loves of her life. Later she will inherit the shop.

She values friendship, but romance has no meaning for her. She values her independence too much and knows all too well what price women pay for being married.

It is German army photographer Armin who will change the course of her life. Jakoba is forty when she meets him. Armin is almost thirty, and Germany has occupied Holland. It does not matter. For him, she’s the one, and despite her hesitation both because of the war and because she can’t understand what this handsome man sees in her—a plain woman—she has to admit her feelings for him.

Such love has consequences for both of them that will reach far beyond the war and in ways Jakoba could never have imagined.

An excerpt

We were standing so close that we could have touched, but we didn’t. The distance, however small, was something neither of us tried to bridge. Someone knocked on the door, a soldier in the uniform of the occupiers asked something in German and I remembered where I was and Someone had noticed me and it was impossible for me to turn the time back to the shadow of anonymity. Just because I had seen hundreds of customers come and go, many a hundred times and more, did not mean all those people had taken much notice of me beyond my function as shop owner. Armin Deutz didn’t want to buy or borrow from me or didn’t even seem to require my friendship. I had no idea what he did want.

* * * *

 

I so intensely wanted to touch him, there in that darkroom between the photos. My hands almost hurt from the memory of how much I wanted to touch him on that day in 1940, so many years ago. That longing never went away, and to me that has always remained one of the biggest mysteries of all.

The Bookshop is available at: https://www.totallybound.com/book/the-bookshop

Blog: https://rapadmos.wordpress.com/