The Paris Girl: The Young Woman Who Outwitted the Nazis and Became a WWII Hero

[bucolic_frolic]

https://www.amazon.com/Paris-Girl-Young-Outwitted-Became/dp/0806544295

Movingly written by her own daughter, this captivating and intimate biography chronicles the astonishing courage Andrée Griotteray, a teenage girl in Nazi-occupied Paris who would become a hero of the French Resistance through her harrowing work as an underground intelligence courier. For readers of Three Ordinary Girls, A Woman of No Importance, Lis Parisiennes, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line, and the many other untold stories of WWII’s “hidden figures.”

Andrée Griotteray was just 19 when the Germans invaded France and occupied Paris, where she worked as a clerk in the passport office. When her younger brother, Alain, created a resistance network named Orion, Andrée joined his efforts, secretly typing up and printing copies of an underground newspaper, and stealing I.D. cards which allowed scores of Jewish citizens to escape persecution.

Charming and pretty, Andrée nimbly avoided the unwanted attentions of German officers, even as she secretly began working as an undercover courier. Displaying fearlessness in the face of immense pressure, she traveled throughout the county delivering vital intelligence destined for France’s allies—until the day she was betrayed and arrested.

Throughout her ordeal, Andrée stayed composed, refusing to inform on her comrades. Before she was set free, she even duped her interrogators into revealing who had betrayed Orion, and continued her underground activities until France’s liberation.

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A good read with much practical survival thinking by those involved. The Resistance had many independent organizations, if created in the minds of many post-war. SOE and OSS, British and American intelligence, respectively, were fighting for turf and control while cooperating with Resistance groups. It is rare to find a book told from the French perspective in such detail, in my reading experience anyway.

[Mike 03]

1. Thanks for posting this. I love this type of micro-history.

What you wrote about gleaning practical advice from resistors and just plain ordinary citizens who were not down with Nazism is so true. They lived through this and thanks to modern historians we can read their thoughts, their logic and the actions they undertook at the time.

A few books I read while trying to imagine what this could be like are:

Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany by Marion Kaplan

What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, an Oral History, by Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband

Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche

Maybe it's just me but I find SO much value in the stories, diaries, recollections. They inspire and inform and help modern citizens to contemplate the unthinkable and imagine how they'd respond.

[japple]

2. Thank you for posting this. I have read several of the books in this genre and am

eager to read more. I remember reading about Andree and her brother and their work in the resistance.

Here is another good one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_Dies_Alone

[C0RI0LANUS]

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