Product Description

War makes for difficult decisions.
At the beginning of the Second World War, after the fall of France, Churchill decided to demilitarize the Channel Islands and allow their occupation by the Germans because of their proximity to the Occupied French coast. The events that followed are still being elucidated in the decade since the opening of the archives.
In War on the Margins, we see the effects of the occupation upon marginalized persons such as clerk Marlene Zimmer, the child of a deceased Jewish father and Gentile mother, Claude Cahun (Lucille Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe),Surrealist artists and longtime lovers, and Peter, an escaped Polish slave worker. We follow Suzanne and Lucille in their uniquely Surrealist Resistance activities and as they suffer in German military prison, and revisit Marlene, hiding from her own local authorities, as she slowly realizes that the decisions she has made resulted in the imprisonment of one woman and the saving of the life of another.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1463848 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 337 pages

Rainbow Reviews March 31, 2008
Two Surrealist Lesbian artists work their own Underground Resistance movement to undermine the Nazi Occupation of Europe's Channel Islands.

I think most individuals born since the end of World War II are familiar with the insidious nature of that war only at a distance. Dates, names, generals, and presidents are tossed at us in world history classes, and we hear monologue from the generation which lived through that infamy. Yet it is seldom that a book brings home to us the real pervasiveness of terror that is the legacy of the Nazi war machine.

War on the Margins I found unforgettable. I turned pages, not reading, but living the experiences of the three strong heroines and the various individuals, of good intent and of greed, scattered in their paths.

The Channel Islands between France and Jersey are not much heard of in historical accounts, yet their natives and residents suffered just as deeply from the Nazi occupation as did the inhabitants of Occupied Denmark and France. Among these are Marlene, daughter of a long-dead Jewish father, who works in the Aliens Office and is exposed firsthand to the rigors of registration of Jews and others deemed "subhuman" by the Nazis, and Surrealist artists and Lesbians, "Claude Cahun" and "Marcel Moore" (Lucille and Suzanne), who wage their own version of Resistance, attempting to undermine the Occupation and to rescue whom they can.

Although the story is not particularly graphic, its details and individual revelations tug at the heartstrings. Each chapter is prefaced with an actual historical document, revealing the progression of the Nazi pincer grip on Jewish residents and the progressive dehumanization of Jewish people, even those who have a very small percentage of Jewish nativity. This is a book the reader will not soon forget, nor will we forget the characters.

Review by Frost's Fancy

Nothing Binding
The story is gripping from the beginning. You see how different people react to various levels of danger. The effect becomes more intense when you realize that these events really did take place. Libby Cone gives you the story with clever use of actual correspondence and public notices from the time. She weaves her characters around those building each scene on the facts. The evil that was the Nazis is carefully but clearly developed in the story. People lived in fear not only of the Germans, but of each other too. The book does an excellent job of draping the whole in a cloak of doubt and suspicion. This is one good read.

dovegreyreader scribbles
"Libby capably and confidently weaves a pitch-perfect novel out of the
facts surrounding the oppression of the Jews on the island and the
resistance movement set up by surrealist artists Claude Cahun and Marcel
Moore (Lucille and Suzanne). It's gripping, heart-rending reading and as
you read the original and progressively more bewildering edicts issued
by the Nazis against the Jews you realise again, as if you needed
reminding, just how ridiculously terrible it all was.Considering this is
research transformed it all sat very comfortably as I read, no ten tons
of obstructively heavy or thesis-like information to detract."