"This story has haunted me since I was a child."

So begins Anne Sinclair in her best-selling personal account about her journey to find answers about her own life and that of her grandfather Léonce Schwartz. In the Shadows of Paris is part memoir, part historical document revealing a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust. On 12 December 1941, the Nazis carried out a mass arrest-in French the word is rafle, but there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror-of einflussreiche Juden, as the Germans put it. For that there is an equivalent: "influential Jews."

Those doctors, professors, artists and others at the upper levels of French society were then imprisoned less than fifty miles from Paris in the Royallieu-Compiègne concentration camp. Those who did not perish in Frontstalag 122 were deported by the infamous cattle cars to Auschwitz and other death camps, except for the few to escape that fate. Léonce Schwartz was one of them.