Paris Underground Book

Re-read March 2013.
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Originally read April 2012.

Downloaded as a free ebook from Barnes & Noble.

I found this book incredibly gripping; I began reading in the evening, read until the wee hours, and picked it up again as soon as I could. It's not the quality of the writing that held me, but the unfolding of events.

This book, published in 1943, is an autobiographical account of a middle-aged American woman (Etta Shiber) living in Paris in the 1930s. After her husband died, she left Manhattan to live with a friend, Kitty, an Englishwoman who had married a French wine merchant whom she later amicably divorced. The two women live quietly but happily together for three years, busy with various social engagements and interests; then war breaks out. When the Germans succeed in their Blitzkrieg and are suddenly only a day from Paris, the women attempt to flee, but the roads are jammed with refugees, and the Germans are upon them. They witness a strafing of refugees by the German pilots; are near to having been killed themselves. Forced to return to Paris, they make a brief stop at an inn for some tea--they have been on the road for two days and nights at this point--and at this inn they encounter a British RAF pilot. This chance meeting changes their lives.

The two women, Kitty in her mid-forties and Shiber ten years older, take it upon themselves to try to save this young man. They smuggle him into Paris--despite encountering four German checkpoints en route--then to their flat, and eventually are able to get him over the demarcation line; finally, he is returned to England. During this nerve-wracking time (the pilot is in their flat for weeks, and the Germans are gradually making thorough searches of each building, a block at a time) they make contacts with other young English soldiers and with people who are working to smuggle them out of the country. One thing leads to another . . . and eventually the two women help to smuggle 150 Englishmen, and about that many French soldiers, out of the country.

SPOILER:

The two women and their co-conspirators are eventually caught, tried, and sentenced. Shiber writes about the ghastly prison conditions and her experiences there. Parted from her friend, who has received a death sentence, she wonders what has become of her. Shiber's own health declines rapidly; eventually she has several heart attacks. In 1942 she is released as part of a US-Germany prisoner exchange program--this is where the book opens; then it goes back to explain how this journey of hers began.

At the time of the book's publication, Shiber still does not know what happened to her friend Kitty.

Immediately upon finishing the book, I did some Google searches to find out more about Shiber and her story, but so far all I've found is that the author died in 1948.

One of the amazing things about this book is how absolutely unlikely a resistance hero this woman was. She was a Manhattan housewife, then widow, who lived a quiet and unremarkable life untouched by danger until these events and situations were thrust upon her. She is clear throughout the book that she was reluctant, anxious, frightened--but nonetheless, she did this. I have to wonder what I would do in such circumstances.