AMONG BOOKS ON WORLD WAR II THAT I’VE READ, this one stands out for its extraordinary portrayal of lives at the time of the German invasion of France in June 1940. It is not just a book about action, but about the stillness, gaps and chaos of a particular segment of the war. It gives a tangible feeling of what it must have been to be a refugee at the time.
Nemirovsky shows a remarkable ability to empathise with all kinds of people, including German soldiers and the mixed reactions to them by the people, especially women. Her genius in portraying the ordinariness of life in the midst of the tumult and fear during the occupation is shown in the vivid description of a cat hunting. The upheaval of evacuation too is rendered palpably and conveys a real sense of the people’s feelings and reactions in such a mass event. Another noteworthy detail is the deftness with which Nemirovsky captures the interaction between mass emotion and personal selfishness. The murder of the priest by his young charges is an example of the author’s ability to get under the skin of all kinds of people. The chilling portrait of the aesthete, Charles, who steals petrol from fellow evacuees and feels good about it, is the purest example of evil in the book – rather than anything done by the Germans.
The book raises the spectre of French collaborators and the slave labour deportations of 1943. For me, the book is far more a moral critique of the French middle class than just a war story. The ethical choices individuals make are at the very heart of the book and determine the characters, all of whom behave sometimes in evasive and sometimes heroic ways, as did the real resistance. One cannot help but consider the concept of moral luck, whereby it is only by the luck of not being in a certain situation that we avoid finding ourselves becoming villains – such as the obscure clerk, Eichmann.
The narrative is remarkably free of Jewish self-consciousness. Nemirovsky was arrested and taken to Auschwitz in 1942, where she later died. At the time of her writing the novel, she could not have known what awaited her and other Jews in the death camps. Therefore, in essence, the novel is of a French woman and not of a Jewish woman. Given what she and fellow Jews suffered, this makes for a disquieting impact.
Her daughter, Denise Epstein, was twelve at the time of her parents’ death. The father, too, was arrested and sent to the gas chamber. She sequestered her mother’s manuscript. Sixty years later Denise Epstein realised that the notes she had carried with her was the manuscript of her mother’s novel. It was finally published in 2004.
– Golden Langur
