One Day in France
Jean-Marie Borzeix reconstructs a 1944 German reprisal in Bugeat and uncovers the identity of a long-forgotten victim.
- Author
- Jean-Marie Borzeix
- Publisher
- I.B. Tauris
- Price
- £16.99
- ISBN
- 9781784536220
- Published
- 2017
One Day in France by Jean-Marie Borzeix (Translated by George McAuley)
On Thursday 6 April 1944 a German patrol entered the Limousin town of Bugeat to hunt for Resistance fighters believed to be hiding in the surrounding forests. The maquis had been active—blowing bridges, derailing trains, attacking barracks and convoys—and the patrol seized four farm workers as a reprisal. They, and an unidentified fifth man, were executed as a warning.
More than sixty years later Jean-Marie Borzeix set out to uncover the unknown victim’s story. His investigation leads from rural France to Paris, Israel and the darkest corners of the Holocaust. Once foreign Jews had been rounded up it was the turn of French Jews, many of whom survived only through the bravery of villagers who hid them.
The book’s final chapters confront the raw subject of collaboration and the bitter conflicts between French citizens themselves. One Day in France is a disturbing, meticulously researched account of a forgotten atrocity in a small town and the courage of those who resisted.
ISBN 9781784536220. I.B. Tauris. £16.99.