Although I don't usually read this type of nonfiction, I was caught in the immediacy of this memoir, and I am delighted that I read it. The daily details of Agnes Humbert's early work in the French resistance and her subsequent years of imprisonment were told in literate and descriptive detail. I would rate this book comparable to the Diary of Anne Frank. Amazingly calm and factual, the author portrayed even the most horrific circumstances of her ordeal with precise word pictures and calm detachment. An inspiring story of courage and determination, this book deserves my highest recommendation. ( )

Humbert wonderfully recounts with vivid detail her participation in the Paris resistance of German occupation in 1940, her subsequent arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, and imprisonment, trial, and forced labor. And despite all her hardship, once the American forces reached her in Germany, she took control of imposing order on the town and rooting out the local Nazis. A woman of admirable courage. ( )

This book was not what I expected. I think that this may be partially because the the title Resistance led me to expect more about the resistance movement in France in general, and not as much the story of a woman's personal resistance, not only of the occupiers of her homeland, but of imprisonment, despair and hate.

The book spans nearly 5 years, of which only 10 months are spent as part of the active resistance movement. Those months are also at the very formation of that movement, so the work done, while vastly influential, is not as directly powerful as that which came later. I was quite surprised that the vast majority of this book is a chronicle of the author's time in prison and serving as forced-labor in Germany.

The personality of Humbert shines through this book on every page, even at her lowest moments she has an energy that is almost palpable on the page. Yet her descriptions of the horrors she is witness to, and victim of, are almost dispassionate in their honesty.

Although this book was not what I expected, I'm glad to have read it. ( )

Agnes Humbert was an art historian turned member of the Resistance after Paris fell to the Germans in June, 1940. She, her family and much of the population of Paris fled the city as the Germans approached. Scenes of horror unfolded as she walked with masses of people from Paris to south of Limoges. Her account of her journey is immediate and heartrending.

Humbert was languishing in the countryside and sinking into despair when she heard a broadcast by General de Gaulle exhorting the French soldiers and people to rally round him and carry on the struggle. She wrote of her reaction: “A feeling I thought had died forever stirs within me: hope.” Humbert was further buoyed by radio broadcasts recounting that the people of Paris were tearing down German posters as quickly as they were posted. The people of Paris were rebelling! She waded through the bureaucracy to obtain the papers that allowed her to return to Paris in August, 1940. Thus began her journal and memoir of her life as a member of the French Resistance and political prisoner subjected to forced labour in German prisons.

The book is two parts journal and one part memoir. Until two days before her arrest on April 15, 1941, Humbert maintained a journal. After she was liberated from the German prison in April, 1945, her journal commenced again. The story she told of the time in between was from memory. It was vivid.

Journal and memoir—throughout, the reader feels the author’s sense of humor, sense of the absurd, and courage. One gains an acute understanding of the strength of conviction of Humbert and of her fellows, and further, of the risks they undertook both before and after their arrests. The reader will cringe at the descriptions of the abuse and deprivation Humbert suffered while in prison, and cheer her efforts to sabotage the enemy’s war efforts in the small ways that were available to her.

I will not soon forget this book; it is incredible to me that it was published in 1946 but not published in translation until 2008.

I have only one other comment and that is about the translation. I believe the spirit of the book and the language of the book were accurately translated, so I am being a bit picky to say that the voice of the author does not come through as a French voice. The French have a certain way of expressing themselves that is different from the way we English speakers do. I would like to read it in French to see if it is just that much better. ( )

Agnès Humbert was born in 1894 to a French soldier and an English expatriate mother. In 1916, at age twenty-one, she married George Sabbagh, an Egyptian-born artist who served in the British army during World War I. Both became pupils of the Symbolist painter Maurice Denis. Her sons Jean and Pierre were born in 1917 and 1918, but by 1934, Humbert and Sabbagh were divorced. Humbert, who had been trained as a watercolorist, went on to study art history at the Ecole du Louvre, where she also earned two postgraduate diplomas in philosophy and ethnography. Having established a solid reputation as an art historian, she joined the staff of Musée des Artes et Traditions Populaires. True to her leftist and militant anti-fascist beliefs, she was a staunch supporter of the Popular Front and a teacher at the Université ouvrière (worker's university). Her professional life reflected her political convictions: she collected photographic documentation of the strikes of 1936 and traveled to Russia in 1939 to study Soviet cultural life. When World War II broke out, she was forty-three years old and had two grown sons. (Biographical information from Julien Blanc's Afterword.)

Personal politics aside, Humbert does not fit the image we often have of a "resistance" fighter. She was not a young romantic. She was sympathetic to communism but she wasn't a revolutionary. Under the German occupation, she wasn't desperate and could have remained in her position if she just kept her head down. But the humiliation of defeat and invasion, and an ensuing sense of restlessness urging her *just to do something*, drove her and several fellow intellectuals to come together and form what became one of the primary foundations of the famed French Resistance. Humbert distributed anti-Nazi propaganda, edited an anti-Nazi broadsheet, and participated in nascent intelligence-gathering operations. But a Gestapo double agent betrayed the group, and she was arrested in March of 1941. She spent a year in a notorious Nazi-controlled French prison, faced a sham trial, and was subsequently deported to Germany to serve as an industrial slave laborer.

"Résistance: A Woman's Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France," first published in 1946 but only just now appearing in English (to be released tomorrow, September 23, 2009, by Bloomsbury Books) recounts, in present-tense diary form, Agnès Humbert's nearly five years in Nazi captivity. Though she was never held in an actual death/concentration camp (i.e. Auschwitz, Dachau), the conditions she endured may well have matched what many Jewish inmates experienced. Close, constant, and unprotected contact with acid and chemical vapor destroyed the prisoners' hands and clothing, caused spells of blindness, and ravaged their lungs. Hygiene was nonexistent, from overflowing sop buckets to underwear unwashed for weeks. Beatings were frequent. The winter cold was relentless, air raids were a constant threat, and the scant food was barely edible. Humbert was also briefly held at Allendorf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she observed prisoners abandoned in cells with only the dead for company.

Still, throughout her ordeal, Humbert never lost her sense of humor, her pride, her principles, or her strength and ability to seek support and fraternity even when humanity seemed to be at its worst. Her voice is vivid and unwavering: a blend of irreverence, wry wit, and the occasional drift into intellectual contemplation. It is this latter quality that gives the narrative its unique voice. As Julien Blanc discusses in the Afterword, "'Résistance' juxtaposes two distinct types of writing - the raw spontaneity of diary entries and the more considered reflections from memory - corresponding to two distinct time frames. . . It is this hybrid structure, combining two literary genres that are usually quite distinct, that makes 'Résistance' unique among such memoirs." (For example, Humbert at one point shifts from a detailed description of the dangerous work performed by the prisoners in the textile factory to an ironic exposition on the eternal obedience and trustworthiness of the machine.)

In that respect, "Résistance" also differs from every Holocaust memoir I've read. In his introduction to Jakov Lind's "Landscape in Concrete," a "Catch-22"-like novel about an overly obedient oaf of a German soldier, Joshua Cohen states that if the Holocaust might be regarded as the culmination or perfection of European industrial society, then so too has Holocaust literature largely exhibited "a perfection of European culture: Accounts of the tragedy have almost always been technically sterile, stylistically orderly, factual. Classical. Apollonian, to a fault." Humbert, though detailed and precise in her recollections, does not simply recite the facts as they happened, as Elie Wiesel did in "Night." "Résistance" is ultimately as much about Humbert herself as it is about what happened to the Third Reich's political prisoners. Although her participation in the actual Resistance occupies only about 50 out of 270 pages, the remainder of the book is concerned with alternative forms of resistance: emotional, psychological, and even surreptitiously physical. The reader is both immersed in the horrific Nazi penal system and in the mind of a singular individual. Humbert's innate spirit and personality dominate the narrative as much as external events do.

"Résistance: A Woman's Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France" is both a powerful work and a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in WWII/the Holocuast or simply history in general. It also has strong feminist appeal, not only in the figure of Agnès Humbert herself (who went on to hunt Nazis for the liberating American military), but also in the fact that, according Julian Blanc, women have been glaringly absent from many chronicles of the French Resistance, appearing only in obligatory, generalized odes to the abstract "woman of the Resistance." (Women as one-dimensional symbols instead of as three-dimensional human beings . . . grrrr, I hate that!) It is a true-life memoir with all the appeal of a fictional novel: it is suspenseful, fast-paced, vivid and descriptive, with a cast of memorable "characters." In other words: a great choice even for those who don't usually read non-fiction. Strongly recommended.

(One thing I did find troubling, though, was Humbert's apparent sympathy for the Soviet Union. Judging by both Résistance and biographical information I also read, Humbert seems to have glossed over the atrocities committed by Stalin, who ended up killing more people than Hitler. At one point, for instance, she laments the arrival of young, innocent Ukrainian girls, recalling "the girls that I saw in the collective farms around Kiev in 1939, singing from sheer joie de vivre, and now here they are shackled in slavery." For the full story of these so-called "collective farms" in Ukraine, look up the Holodomor.) ( )