Refined and Courage's Cost

The Guardian (US) described the book as "a mix of history, biography, and memoir that reads like a nerve-racking thriller." This heroic true story follows the three youngest children of a bourgeois Catholic family who worked together in the French Resistance. The story is told by an American writer who has known and admired the family for five decades.

In the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle's military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France. Tragically, he was betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. Despite this setback, his sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. André survived three concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciling France and Germany. Sadly, his parents and oldest brother were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and they perished in the camps. Since then, the Boulloches family has maintained a profound silence as a means of coping with their unbearable ordeal. This book marks the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary experience.

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