Resistance: A Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France - Softcover

“You may think you've read stories like this before, yet hers is special...Résistance was written by a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage. Her perceptions are...acute, honest and humane.”—Newsday

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance—very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)

In the throes of their struggle for freedom, the members of Humbert’s group were betrayed to the Gestapo; Humbert herself was imprisoned. I n immediate, electrifying detail, Humbert describes her resistance against the Nazis, her time in prison, and the horrors she endured in a string of German labor camps, always retaining—in spite of everything—hope for herself, for her friends, and for humanity. Originally published in France in 1946, the book is now translated into English for the first time.

Agnès Humbert was a distinguished art historian and a member of the Museé de l’Homme group in the French Resistance. She survived the war and died in Valmondois, France, in 1963.

Barbara Mellor is a translator specializing in the fine and decorative arts, art history, architectural history, fashion, design, and all things French. During her research into a Resistance ambush of a German armored column in Aveyron, she stumbled across the 1946 edition of Résistance.