Description: A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it came to be known, was remembered after the war and how Deportation memory from the very outset, became politicized against the backdrop of changing domestic and international contexts. He shows how the Deportation generated competing narratives - Jewish, Catholic, Communist, and Gaullist - and analyzes the stories told by and about deportees after the war and how these stories were given form in literature, art, film, monuments, and ceremonials.
Brief description: Philip Nord is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. His publications include France 1940: Defending the Republic (2015) and France's New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (2010).
Review Quotes: 'This rich, nuanced, and often moving book uses a wide range of sources and methods-literary criticism, art history, and an analysis of philosophical debates-to make a major contribution to our understanding of how the French have remembered one of the most painful periods in their history.' Julian Jackson, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History