What’s in it for me? A story of war rarely told: from the women who survive it.
History is rich in stories about the soldier’s experience of war. Few speak of the women and children who survive the grueling hardships, threats, and deprivations of life under enemy occupation.then.
When estranged sisters Vianne Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol hear the first rumors of war in 1939, they’re already coping with incredible loss. But what they endure in coming years will test their will to survive in ways they can’t imagine.
Wife and mother, Vianne, sees her husband become a prisoner of war, her home occupied by German officers, and friends brutalized and deported. Teenage rebel Isabelle finds her way into the French resistance, risking everything to fight back and liberate France.
While a work of historical fiction, it was inspired by the true story of Belgian resistance operative Andrée de Jongh, who smuggled Allied airmen to safety across Nazi-occupied territories, and survived forced labor in a prison camp after she was captured.
As a quick warning, since this story outlines the cruelty of war in detail, this Blink also contains descriptions of violence, abuse, and rape. So please take care while listening/ reading.
The Long Shadow of War
Our tale opens twice. First, in 1995 in Oregon, as an elderly woman retrieves a chest of memories from the attic that hint at her early life in France. A life her adult son seems to know nothing about. Then, in flashback, in late summer of 1939 and the small town of Carriveau, France.
We meet Vianne Mauriac, a mother and school teacher with a challenging past. As a young girl she’d seen her poet father come back from fighting in World War I a bitter, broken alcoholic. When Vianne’s mother died shortly after, he abandoned Vianne and her sister, four-year-old Isabelle, to a loveless foster home.
Vianne soon married schoolmate Antoine and had a daughter. But her sister Isabelle became a rebellious girl and teen, sent away to boarding school after boarding school, escaping to return to her father in Paris, only to be sent away again.
Against this tragic backdrop, the first rumors of war quickly become reality and Vianne’s husband Antoine is mobilized to the front. Isabelle is expelled from another boarding school and returns to Paris to convince her father to let her stay. But when the Germans overrun the French Army and the Nazis are marching toward Paris, he sends Isabelle to Vianne in Carriveau.
Isabelle's journey quickly becomes harrowing. As millions flee on foot, bombing from German planes turns the refugees into targets. The injured and starving are women, children, and the elderly. They sleep in open fields and steal food in desperation from gardens along the way – including Vianne’s.
Isabelle meets an enigmatic young stranger, Gaëtan, also fleeing Paris. He helps her survive the dangerous journey and listens to her plans to become part of the resistance. They share a first kiss on arrival in Carriveau. He then promptly disappears.
The estranged sisters begin a tense reunion. Isabelle rages that French forces have surrendered, abandoning citizens to Nazi occupation. Vianne hopes for the best, thinking surrender means French soldiers will come home. Instead, the Germans march into Carriveau and take over.
After Isabelle hides the family valuables in a secret cellar in the barn, the situation takes a dark turn. German officials announce all radios must be turned in, that all food will be rationed, windows blacked out, and a strict curfew enforced.
As they discuss the news, a German officer, Captain Beck, arrives and announces that he will be staying in their home.
ANALYSIS
Setting the entire novel in flashback, without a clue as to who is remembering these events, starts the story off on a note of mystery. It also personalizes the deep dive into the histories of our two main characters – relating the sisters’ personal experiences with the costs of war and tragedy, revealing how it shaped their opposing characters.
Their trauma over their father’s dramatic change after fighting in World War I, the death of their mother, and their abandonment as young girls foreshadows events to come. In response, Vianne has created her own little family, albeit with a sorrowful recent history of miscarriage and pregnancy loss. Isabelle has become an idealistic and strong-willed rebel, still valiantly trying to win her father’s love.
Their personal history explains the extraordinary tension that existed between France and Germany before the breakout of the Second World War. The wounds are still fresh, the trauma of the Great War is still resonating. This explains the raw terror that saw millions fleeing ahead of the German army on foot.
Vianne’s confidence in the decision to surrender and negotiate stems from the French victory in the previous war. Isabelle’s feelings of betrayal at the French surrender and her intense hatred of the German Army, relate more directly to her father’s transformation and rejection than geo-global politics.
The fictional village of Carriveau, nestled in the Loire Valley close to Tours, is also established as a strategic location because of a local airfield. This explains the military occupation of a small town, the strict rules for the population, and German officers taking over local homes. Captain Beck’s presence in Vianne’s home exposes her vulnerability. Without the protection of a husband, she’s powerless to do anything except try and keep her family alive.
Keeping Calm and Carrying On
With the German occupation of the village made intimate by Captain Beck's occupation of Vianne’s home, she’s faced with a bizarre reality. Keeping Isabelle from confronting the officer is a source of constant anxiety, particularly when Isabelle begins influencing her daughter Sophie’s attitude.
With French surrender, food immediately becomes scarce. Rationing sees the German Army and French collaborators growing fat while the population slowly starves. Phone and mail become unreliable. Essentials like soap and milk are impossible to find. In a short time, the familiar hometown becomes strange, with daily ration lines for the population while German soldiers enjoy cafés and restaurants.
Captain Beck shows real consideration and admiration for his host and concern for her family. He offers to help Vianne and fellow townswomen communicate with their soldier husbands. But no kindness from Beck softens Isabelle. Her defiance and rage are open. Aware her behavior puts Vianne and Sophie at risk, Isabelle attempts to return to Paris and make her way into the resistance.
Forbidden to travel by her lack of official identification and German permission, Isabelle returns home – but soon finds herself defacing local Nazi propaganda posters. An act punishable by death, she’s caught and dragged into a nearby shopfront where instead of German soldiers, she meets members of the growing French resistance. Almost too eagerly, she joins the cause.
Isabelle embraces her new role as courier for the resistance, keeping this news from her sister. Operating as a spy under the same roof as Captain Beck brings great fear – and secret delight.
But Vianne’s compliance also costs her. After organizing communications with her prisoner husband, Captain Beck asks Vianne to list the names of every Jew, Communist, homosexual, freemason, and Jehovah’s Witness she knows. Vianne’s best friend and neighbor, Rachel, is Jewish, making this list a particularly personal betrayal.
Soon after, Beck informs Vianne that the French soldiers who were captured will remain prisoners of war. Hopes for her husband’s quick return vanish. Shortages of food and fuel begin stressing Vianne’s limited finances. The small savings left by her husband and her modest teaching salary, do little as price gouging leaves them closer and closer to poverty.
But things get darker still when the Gestapo fires Jewish and communist teachers from the local school – including Rachel. This leaves Vianne deeply ashamed and feeling guilty about the list she made – and betrayed by Captain Beck.
In the aftermath of this latest oppression, Isabelle steps up her role in the resistance, offering to carry a message all the way to Paris. There, Isabelle finds her father’s bookstore sacked by Nazi soldiers, and her father working for an occupied hotel. Taking up her childhood bedroom, she reopens the family bookstore and uses it as a communication center for the local spy network – right under the noses of the German soldiers more interested in a pretty French shopgirl than great literature.
Vianne finds life easier in Carriveau without her openly defiant sister, but when another dear colleague is fired from teaching and deported, Vianne can’t hold her tongue and speaks up. She’s summarily fired and now faces destitution with no income to feed her family. Beck’s assurance that she and her daughter won’t starve does little to comfort her as their survival is now dependent on him. She understands the hatred for French collaborators and the shame she’ll endure if she’s found out. She’s also grateful knowing her daughter Sophie won’t starve for her outburst.
Back in Paris, Isabelle stumbles across a downed British pilot hiding from German forces. Thinking quickly, she hides him in the small closet behind her bedroom armoire before smuggling him to a safe house. This spontaneous decision gives her away to her father and forces a meeting with resistance members to form a plan to smuggle the airman to safety. At this meeting, Isabelle proposes leading the airman by train across occupied France and then on foot across the Pyrenees to the British embassy in Spain.
When Gaëtan reappears at the meeting, Isabelle is plunged back into her intense feelings for him alongside this new level of danger. At home, Isabelle’s father reveals his own job in the resistance: forging paperwork. He’ll forge the paperwork that gives the airman a fighting chance. In fact, he’s also forged Isabelle’s own false identity paperwork as Juliette Gervaise: the false identity she’ll use to launch her bold escape plan.
ANALYSIS
Here at the story’s midpoint, the lives of the estranged sisters are again separate. Vianne walks a fine line between survival and collaboration with Captain Beck in Carriveau, while Isabelle becomes Juliette Gervaise and ramps up her leadership in the growing French resistance.
Just as Vianne’s feelings for Captain Beck grow more and more complicated, so do Isabelle’s for her father. Discovering his activities for the resistance has drawn them closer. Reconnecting with enigmatic love interest Gaëtan builds Isabelle’s confidence even more. Gaëtan’s confession that he secretly connected her to the resistance back in Carriveau deepens her connection to him. Her idea of using an old friend of her mother in the Pyrenees to find a guide across the mountains helps Isabelle feel closer to her mother, too.
At the very moment she’s no longer Isabelle but Juliette Gervaise, she’s reconciled with much of her past.
The sisters represent two common reactions to enemy occupation. Vianne is coping with the cognitive dissonance of a kind, supportive enemy. Knowing her situation could be far worse, she still feels immense shame about listing names and betraying friends.
At the same time, Isabelle’s bravado in the face of the overwhelming dangers is at once admirable and impetuous. As a pretty young woman, she’s aware the Germans see her as incapable of real treachery. Using this bias to her advantage, she’s emboldened to step up her activities despite the risks.
Desperate Times
With Isabelle now Juliette Gervais, code-named Nightingale for Rossignol (her surname and French for nightingale), her ambitious trips across France and the Pyrenees begin. Successful in her first harrowing attempt despite no mountaineering experience, the astonished officials at the British embassy in Spain can hardly believe a young woman has executed such a daring plan.
Back in Carriveau, poverty has driven Vianne to stop eating, giving her daughter any scrap of food they have. She’s been selling off the family treasures but the Germans have looted the rest. When she collapses from hunger and almost dies, she shamefully accepts her reliance on Captain Beck to keep her going.
But as the Allies turn the tide of the war and America joins the fight, German occupation becomes brutal. Jews must wear yellow stars on their clothing and are banned from shops and businesses. Beck warns Vianne about her friend Rachel’s deportation. Vianne helps Rachel’s family attempt a daring escape.
When it goes tragically wrong, Vianne is left raising Rachel’s infant son. Beck secures false papers for the boy. Faced with other children orphaned in the deportations, she organizes to hide other Jewish children from the village at the local orphanage. She takes a job as a teacher at the orphanage school to stay close.
Soon after, Isabelle passes through Carriveau on her way back to Paris from another successful run. When she stumbles on another downed Allied pilot, she quickly organizes to hide him in the secret cellar of the family barn. She’s discovered first by Vianne, who rages but attempts to keep her hidden. But Beck is leading the search and soon discovers the secret cellar. Vianne kills him, but not before Beck shoots Isabelle in the shoulder. Vianne learns of Isabelle’s work as the Nightingale and lets the resistance organize the cover-up of Beck’s death and smuggle Isabelle to safety.
But this night sets off a chain of events that leads Isabelle and Vianne down even darker paths. Cruel SS Officer Von Richter moves into Vianne's home and delights in tormenting her. Trying to protect both her daughter and Rachel’s son, she withstands him raping and brutalizing her in silence.
While Isabelle heals, she lingers in a safe house with Gaëtan and has her first experience of love. Knowing time is short makes it intense. Soon after, at the small hut in the Pyrenees that has become like a second home, the Gestapo captures Isabelle and her resistance group.
With the Germans reluctant to believe a young woman could be the notorious Nightingale, Isabelle and Vianne’s father confesses to being the notorious spy and is publicly executed. Isabelle is deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Meanwhile, D-Day has pushed German forces back. One August day in Carriveau, the Nazis mobilize to retreat from France and Von Richter with them. Vianne realizes she’s pregnant with Von Richter’s child.
Soon after, Vianne’s husband Antoine returns after escaping the prison camp. Hiding the truth of what she’s endured, she tells Antoine she’s pregnant from the night of his return. He believes her, accepts Rachel’s son as theirs, and for a time they become a happy family. With France officially liberated, Vianne travels to Paris to inform the Red Cross workers about the 19 Jewish children she’s hidden during the occupation.
Back in Germany, the camps quicken the mass executions. As a political prisoner, Isabelle is deported further East. On the brink of death, her camp is liberated by the Americans.
ANALYSIS
The pace of the story quickens in step with history: war escalates in unpredictable ways. Both Isabelle and Vianne have accomplished things they never dreamed possible, smuggling Allied soldiers and protecting children from deportation. They’ve survived more than they knew they could.
Their father’s false confession and execution is a loving self-sacrifice – one both sisters are now capable of understanding.
Vianne has killed a kind man to protect her sister and is pregnant by a cruel monster she didn’t kill despite wanting to. She’s lied to her husband and buried the truth of what she’s been through for the same reason – to keep surviving.
Isabelle has experienced the real consequences everyone warned her about. She’s endured torture, death marches, and starvation but she’s made it through.
The Long Shadow of Survival
The war over and camps liberated, Isabelle is sent to a hospital in Paris, then home to Vianne in Carriveau. Sick and emaciated, Isabelle can only whisper about what she’s endured, but openly admires her sister’s scheme to hide Jewish children in the occupied town.
In a final bittersweet twist, relatives of Rachel in America send for her son. Soon after becoming a family, their adopted son has to leave.
As Isabelle lingers on the brink of death, Gaëtan returns to Carriveau to find her. She dies smiling in his arms.
Several times the flashback events pause and the story returns to events in the middle of the 1990s – to the old woman remembering. It’s clear the old woman is Vianne when the flashback ends with Isabelle’s death. Vianne’s adult son, then, named Julien after his grandfather, is the grown son of SS officer Von Richter – but he knows nothing of this or his mother’s life in France.
It becomes clear that Vianne is fighting terminal cancer and this has her anxious to reconnect with her life in France. It’s also the 50th anniversary of the end of the war.
Vianne and her son travel to Paris for the first time together to attend a reunion honoring the resistance agent Nightingale. The reunion gives Vianne a moment to speak openly about her sister for the first time in decades. She sees the full legacy of Isabelle’s bravery and has an emotional reunion with Rachel’s son.
ANALYSIS
Like the opening, the story closes twice. First, in France just after the war and the bittersweet reunion of survivors. Then again at an orchestrated reunion in the 1990s, which gives another opportunity to consider the sisters’ wartime sacrifices.
It has become clear that Vianne’s son Julien is Von Richter’s, which explains Vianne’s extreme secrecy about her life in France. Name tags at the Nightingale reunion echo the names of resistance agents we’ve met through Isabelle, bringing closure. Julien’s astonishment at his mother’s past is obvious.
Vianne explains why she and so many women are reluctant to tell their stories. Why she never embraced the idea that she was a hero for saving Jewish children, in light of the sacrifices her father and sister made.
Vianne also hints that she’ll keep the details about her adult son’s biological father a secret. Despite 50 years and a new life in America, some consequences remain secret.
Final Summary
Estranged sisters Vianne and Isabelle have already had it tough long before World War II breaks out. When it does, they have no choice but to survive each day, learning to endure unimaginable loss and suffering. Survival for one meant keeping some secrets long past the end of the war. For the other, it meant sacrificing everything for a liberated France.