US author counts the 'Cost of Courage' in new study of French resistance family

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/14/cost-courage-charles-kaiser-french-resistance

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A book published in the US on Tuesday will, both its author and France’s ambassador to the United Nations hope, help to increase America’s knowledge of the role played by the French resistance in the fight against Nazi Germany.

“People in America know there was a French resistance but their immediate instinct is to be contemptuous of it,” Charles Kaiser, a former reporter for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, told the Guardian. “Because they think it was so small and insignificant.”

Many tales of the French resistance have been told, in literature and on film, particularly on the far side of the Atlantic. But Kaiser’s book, The Cost of Courage, tells a story so painful that for 70 years it was told only at an outwardly insignificant annual family gathering in Père Lachaise cemetery.

He has come to tell it thanks to a friendship that began when his uncle, serving in the US army, was billeted on the Boulloche family in Paris. The result is a mix of history, biography and memoir which reads like a nerve-racking thriller.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, the Boulloches, prosperous Parisians of a slightly nonconformist bent, were rather unremarkable. But between the fall of France in 1940 and the end of the war in 1945, three Boulloche children, André, Christiane and Jacqueline, served remarkable roles in the resistance, risking death to impede the Nazi war effort and in André’s case surviving wounding, imprisonment and possible torture.

Theirs’ is the courage of Kaiser’s title. The greatest cost, however, fell on other family members. Arrested and deported because of their children’s actions, parents Jacques and Hélène Boulloche and their eldest son Robert, none of whom had so actively resisted the Germans, did not survive the camps.

“You had to be really smart, you had to be incredibly determined and you had to be really lucky to survive,” said Kaiser. “You needed all three.”

In New York, Kaiser has found a prominent supporter. François Delattre is a former French ambassador to the US who since September has filled the same post at the UN. He is also a great nephew of André Boulloche.

“I don’t judge of course at all,” Delattre told the Guardian this week, when asked about America’s perceived lack of knowledge of the resistance, before adding that the resistance was both “part of France’s DNA” and “closely intertwined with London and the British” in an “alliance of blood”.

“But I think for various reasons many Americans are not really aware of the importance and the scope of the French resistance despite, for example, General Eisenhower’s memoir, when he wrote that the resistance played a critical role in the success of the D-Day landings, when he said that in June 1944 the resistance in the west of France was the value of 15 military divisions.

“But many Americans – and again I don’t judge or blame anybody – are not really aware of that. For them it’s about the fall of France in 1940, it’s about De Gaulle coming back in 1944.”

For France and the French, in contrast, the resistance and the collaborationist Vichy regime remain as fascinating and difficult subjects as at any time since the end of the war, subjected often to simple silence. As it was for so many other French families, Kaiser said, for the Boulloches “from 1945 till 1998 it was very much a conscious decision that the only way to go forward was not to think about this, just to turn the page, create new lives, to get married and raise families”.

That changed with the deaths of André in 1978 – after a prominent political career – and Jacqueline in 1994, leading Christiane, who still lives in Paris, to explore the prospect of publishing her family’s extraordinary story.

The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ magisterial 1969 documentary which forced France to confront much of its wartime history, casts a long shadow over any discussion of the resistance. Kaiser admits this – and says “there’s not much I admire more than that film” – and Ophuls appears on the pages of his book. Kaiser also cites and engages with the work of one American with an unparalleled knowledge of the resistance, Robert Paxton, a leading historian of the Vichy regime.

“Paxton and Ophuls clearly had more impact in making people think more harshly of the French than they did before,” Kaiser said. “But they also are both people who think it’s a terrible mistake for us to judge the French too harshly.”

In his own consideration of “the black pages and the beautiful pages” of his country’s history, Delattre said: “I think it took time because it was such a dramatic chapter in our existence but I think that after 70 years, the French people are able to have an objective view of what they did in the war.

“[Former president Jacques] Chirac was the first to recognise the crimes of the Vichy regime and it was absolutely right and important to do so. But maybe because of that we then forgot a bit about the resistance, about these righteous among the nations who were so critically important during the war.”

With publication approaching, Kaiser said he had put down “an extremely heavy burden”. The Cost of Courage, he said, was “more complicated for me than anything I have ever written, because I really never have written a book in which there were characters to whom I had such a powerful connection”.

Dalettre said: “What I find particularly beautiful is that the family finally decided to say everything to an American journalist, a friendly guy who was interested.”