One Day in France: Tragedy and Betrayal in an Occupied Village
Jean-Marie Borzeix, One Day in France: Tragedy and Betrayal in an Occupied Village
(I. B. Tauris: 2016)
On the Thursday before Easter 1944, an SS squad arrived early in the morning at a remote village in the Corrèze. They arrested four local men, burned a house and, later that morning, shot dead the four men presumably for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of resistance fighters hiding in the maquis. Jean-Marie Borzeix was born in that part of the country and some years ago he was asked to write an account of their four local heroes for a volume of local history. While he was undertaking the research, the mairie received a request for information about a fifth person who had been shot that day and was, so it was claimed, a member of the Jewish resistance network.
Authorities in the commune were mystified by this request as they could find no evidence that a fifth person was shot and there was no Jewish network in the local resistance. However, as Borzeix questions the locals, follows documentary traces through the archives, and scours the footnotes of the official histories, he discovers that there was indeed a fifth person shot that day.
What began as an attempt to collect oral testimony about the local atrocity before the last survivors died then becomes a far bigger story as it emerges that not only were the four local men arrested and shot, but that eleven Jewish refugees were also taken that day, one of whom was shot dead, his body abandoned on the roadside in remote country. As Borzeix attempts to discover the identity of the fifth man and how and why he died, the quest becomes more complex, the number of unnamed victims associated with that little market town increases and the emotional stakes become higher as the children of the fifth man contribute their own family myths, misrememberings and longings.
Jean-Marie Borzeix uses his family connections with the region to persuade the notoriously clannish locals to talk about what they remember, and he uses his skills as a journalist to pursue archival traces through police files and official histories. Published in France in 2008 by Editions Stock as Jeudi Saint, this book is part history, part personal memoir and it is as compelling as a detective story. Now translated into English as One Day in France, the book contains maps, photographs, a foreword by Caroline Moorehead providing historical context for English readers, and a postscript by the author detailing some of the things that have happened since (and as a result of) the French publication.
Bernard Pivot described the book as “dense et magnifique” and for William Boyd it is “an exceptional and moving work of historical investigation.”
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This Guest Post was written by Gay McAuley, translator of One Day in France