Product Description

Over the fifteen years Rosemary has been living in the region, the more she realised she didn't know about the war; about the French during the Occupation, the real role of the Resistance, the level of collaboration, the concentration camps in the Pyrenees and the treatment of Jews and other refugees. It is still very much a veiled history and most of the archives remain firmly closed. LOVE AND WAR IN THE PYRENEES is a portrait of human tragedy, heroism and cruelty that will create a picture of the period from a contemporary angle, the history linked to sights that can still be visited, and brought to life by letters, interviews and encounters with people today, including the historians currently trying to investigate what really happened.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13526 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

TIME OUT
"moving account of of the region during World War Two"

Review
'Fascinating... courage, cruelty, heroism and the truth about both resistance and collaboration are revealed in a work that brilliantly reconstructs a past that is still contested.' (WATERSTONES BOOKS QUARTERLY )

'Bailey renders history personal and so brings it to life.' (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

'Combining memoir, fact and storytelling, Bailey does an impressive job.' (INDEPENDENT )

'Part travel book, part history, part persnoal memoir, this is a gripping read.' (NORTHERN ECHO )

Review
"impossible to put down... fascinating

Customer Reviews

History made real
History books do not normally make for a riveting read, but this has to be an exception! If you have read and enjoyed Suite Francaise read this - it has the same thought-provoking immediacy and will stay with you for a long time. The author has tracked down the unknown and unsung stories of ordinary people living in the eastern Pyrenees during WW II and the hardships and sacrifices they endured can at times be unbearably sad.

Painstakingly researched, Rosemary Bailey has sensitively teased out, and preserved for posterity, the personal testimonies of survivors (now elderly and often reluctant to talk) whose stories could have been lost forever. A chronological account of the course of the war in France is seamlessly interwoven with the stories of local families. Neglected by other chroniclers, the author exposes the misery suffered by refugees from Franco's Spain in French camps. Early (female) Resistance workers are celebrated and the accounts of those helping endangered intellectuals flee the Nazis are reminiscent of the film, Casablanca.

Whereas many ex-pats are content merely to sit drinking wine in the sunshine of their adopted country (and who can blame them?) Rosemary Bailey, who clearly loves the region she now lives in and has such an affinity with, has tirelessly produced a hugely-principled tribute and enduring memorial to the people of the area that has welcomed her - I hope her dedication is appreciated and that this wonderful book reaches the wide audience it so richly deserves.

World War II From the Pyrenean Perspective
As a frequent visitor to the Pyrénées-Orientales and a keen hiker in its mountains I only had a vague idea of the area's history. I had occasionally passed an old sentry post above the remote village of Mantet and had known that its occupants were once German troops. I had read some accounts of Pyrenean escape routes. Rosemary Bailey's book is a potent antidote to this lack of knowledge since it thoroughly covers this history in the turbulent period of 1939-1944.

The title "Love and War in the Pyrenees" gives a clue to one of the book's core themes of opposites. In the Spanish Civil War the Republicans fight the Nationalists causing refugees to pour over the Pyrenees, the natural border between Spain and France. Rosemary Bailey's abbey Corbiac is the abode where a young couple, Pierre and Amélie, live before they are parted in the general WW2 mobilisation and the "Phoney War". Both continue to communicate by letter from contrasting locations. When full war breaks out Pétain's collaborating Vichy government is countered by de Gaulle's London-based Free French. The German-backed French Milice (militia) battles the Resistance. Above all, the French Revolution's freedom for Jewish people is overturned by their incarceration in southern camps of appalling hardship. The book covers these opposing sides and the often shady and confusing spectrum between each ideological pole.

Love and War includes the following chapters; Return to the Land, The Spanish Retirada, The Camps of Scorn, A Quaker Refuge, The Phoney War, The Fall of France, Defeat, Surrender on Demand, Escape Networks, Rivesaltes, Occupation, Resistance, Liberation and Reprisal. In addition to this clear chronological account the author covers some history of the area and explains how things are today in order to bookend the story both in the past and in the present. Firsthand descriptions from surviving (and now quite elderly) participants in the events are supplemented by a comprehensive batch of written accounts from those that have passed away.

The writing is learned, the subjects varied and the different threads skilfully brought together. Love and War is a book for those seeking to learn more about the area or for the holidaymakers landing at Perpignan's Rivesaltes airport, heading to either the ski slopes or the beach. It's a reminder of what once happened there, not so far away. Throughout the story, the timeless Pyrenees stands watch over the passing confrontations below until she shows her power in a massive, almost biblical, deluge.

Up Close
At the end of "Love and War in the Pyrenees," Rosemary Bailey muses that she wishes she could have written a novel about her topic. Yet it occurs to me--as an inveterate reader of novels and not an aficionado of war stories (I was drawn to this one because it deals with Southern France, which is my home)--that with the vividness of its detail, the complexity of its characters, and the suspensefulness of its story this book creates the engagement of the best novels, while at the same time giving evidence of scrupulous and extensive factual research throughout.
"Love and War in the Pyrenees" is an extraordinary journalistic accomplishment for the extent and quality of materials that it brings together--Bailey has woven together countless tiny threads to achieve a tapestry depicting how the war years actually were to those living through them. The elements she combines range from the sensuously concrete to the broadly philosophical: the ingredients and the aroma of a country soup for a schoolboy who'd barely eaten in days, Sartre's pronouncements on the existential freedom of choosing between loyalty to the Resistance and escape from torture, what fleeing refugees felt on their skin and "in their bones" in a Pyreneean mountain pass on an icy winter night after hours of walking in the dark, what Cocteau's lover wore (turquoise trousers and an ocelot vest) as he hid among gypsies. Bailey goes to ground for primary sources of all kinds, walking the remote trails to freedom in Spain, interviewing veterans on every side of the conflict, reading between the lines of local newspapers which were forbidden to criticize the occupying government but whose police column reported that one person went to jail for stealing a cauliflower and another for making a disrespectful gesture when Petain's name was mentioned. Part of the suspensefulness and engagement she creates is via taking the reader with her on her own process of discovery. She relates how, on listening to a highly emotional survivor describe experiences in the Rivesaltes concentration camp, she "found [her] English self squirming at her histrionic manner," but then Bailey's own empathy deepened as she realized what the story meant to those who had lived it. Thus her book is very much a story of the present as well as of the past. I found it by turns beautiful, horrifying, painful and exalting--anything but a dry history that has "nothing to do with now."