The Cost of Courage

The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser
The Cost of Courage

The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser

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Overview

For the first time, a bourgeois Catholic family tells their extraordinary story of working for the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris during WW2.

“ . . . a mix of history, biography and memoir which reads like a nerve-racking thriller.” —Guardian

In the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the 9 northern regions of France—only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. André survived 3 concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciliation of France and Germany. His parents and oldest brother were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and died in the camps. Since then, silence has been the Boulloches’s answer to dealing with the unbearable.
 
This is the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781590516157
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Publication date: 06/16/2015
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 300
Sales rank: 7,556
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Charles Kaiser is the author of 1968 in America (Grove/Atlantic), one of the most admired popular histories of the music, politics, and culture of the 1960s, and The Gay Metropolis (Houghton Mifflin and Grove), the landmark history of gay life in America, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Lambda Literary Award winner.  He is  is a former reporter for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and a former press critic for Newsweek. His articles and reviews have also appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, New York, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Guardian (UK), and New Republic, among other publications.  He grew up in Washington, D.C., Dakar, Senegal, London, England, and Windsor, Connecticut.  Since 1968 he has always lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, except for two and a half years he spent in France to research this book. 

 
 

Read an Excerpt

André is a handsome twenty-eight-year-old with brown hair and thick eyebrows that hover over a permanent glint in his eye.  Nearly six feet tall, he walks with a tempered, youthful swagger.  Before the war, friends considered him something of a dandy.
         
André has been ordered back to occupied France by Charles de Gaulle, to be the general’s personal military delegate in Paris.  Pseudonym: Armand; code name:  Hypotenuse; André’s charge from the renegade general is to bring some order to the burgeoning Resistance movements now operating in eleven different departments in northern France...Like everyone in the Resistance arriving from England, he also carries a cyanide pill in his pants pocket.  It will stay there, always–unless he is arrested.  When he touches it with his index finger, it feels like insurance against torture.  Or, perhaps, like his destiny.  Either way, he knows he will swallow it if he is captured by the Germans.
           
A certain fatalism fuels his fearlessness.  But there is one irony that probably escapes him: the only thing that might muffle his heroism could be his own survival.

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