In my previous post, I wrote about the marvellous novel by Kristin Hannah entitled The Nightingale. I related how it made me feel and why I consider it a work of art, but I decided to give you yet another reason for which you should read it.
Hannah’s novel, as beautiful and heartbreaking as it is, is not strictly fiction. She was inspired by Andrée de Jongh, a French woman who saved more than a hundred downed airmen on France’s occupied territory during World War II. This woman is a true hero who risked her life for saving all these men from different nationalities using the escape she herself created that went across the Pyrenees to reach the town of San Sebastian, in Spain.
You might very well not know anything of this war hero and that’s exactly the point of Hannah’s novel: to tell the stories of women on the Nazi-occupied territories during the war. Of course, none of them fought as soldiers, but they had their own battlefields. Those who could help their country as much as (im)possible, and most of them paid the price for it. Did you know there were work camps in Germany especially for women who aided refugees? And there were also those women who had a family. They did not wait for their husbands while joyfully playing with their children in flower fields. There was no playing. There was no joy. They had to take care and feed their children with the few crumbles left for them, and to submit themselves to the Nazis who considered themselves all-powerful. A good number of those women also hid Jewish children in their homes, after their parents had been deported, even though the punishment for this “crime” was as awful as you can imagine. And when it all ended, the women had to deal with what they did in order to survive in silence. One of Hannah’s characters relates the situation explicitly: “Women g[o]t on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over” (563).
So, yeah, I spent three posts on The Nightingale (and I could have gone up to ten) because not only is it beautifully written, but it also offers a new perspective to an event that people think they know everything about. I do not take anything away from the brave soldiers who risked their lives to protect their country, but I am thankful to Kristin Hannah who gave a voice to those women who helped in the dark.
-Pénélope Simard
Peas and Jelly 