The larger-than-life World War II story of a Frenchwoman's steadfast opposition to the German occupation of her own home, and her children's global odyssey of combat, protest, and survival.
Before France fell, and before the Vichy Regime took hold, the occupation of the Château de Bosmelet had already begun.
On June 9, 1940, German officers arrived at Henriette de Bosmelet's ancestral home in Normandy with a chilling announcement: the château had been seized, and soldiers would arrive later that day. But rather than flee like other aristocrats, the sixty-year-old widow remained to wage her own personal war against German occupation. What followed was a quiet but unyielding war fought from within her own home, a daily act of defiance that endured for years until she was removed by force?first to prison in Rouen, then into exile in Paris, where she remained until liberation.
For the duration of the war, Henriette watched with grim horror as friends, relatives, and countrymen were displaced, imprisoned, and killed. She also witnessed the ruin of her château, which became an operational launch site for the Germans' infamous V-1 flying bomb and was later destroyed by Allied forces. Yet her greatest fear was for those oldest and closest friends, the Jewish members of the French elite who fell victim to the Vichy regime's expanding antisemitic policies, including deportation to Auschwitz.
But Henriette's story is only part of this extraordinary family saga. Her son Pierre, a lieutenant in the Colonial Army, led a section of Senegalese soldiers in active combat against German forces in France and West Africa, and later served in de Gaulle's London headquarters. Even more harrowing was the journey of Pierre's wife, Diana, a Jewish Englishwoman who fled the château with their children to escape Nazi capture. Torn between her will to survive and her deep love for family, Diana embarked on a global journey from Normandy to southern France, then to Lisbon, New York, Hollywood, West Africa, and London, in a breathtaking odyssey of escape and endurance.
Based on previously undiscovered sources and extensive research, James Lander has resurrected and intertwined the lives of the Bosmelets in fast-paced, vivid, deeply personal detail. The Mother Who Defied the Reich is a thrilling story of courage, patriotism, and the bonds of family.
