Spell-binding WWII novellas found in presumed diary

Irene Nemirovsky was a Jewish Russian immigrant who found success as a novelist in Paris between the world wars. When the Germans marched into Paris in June of 1940, she escaped into the countryside with her husband, also Jewish, and their two daughters. Both parents were arrested that fall and died in concentration camps. With the help of friends who hid them, the children survived the war.

It would have been just one more heartbreaking tale of the Holocaust if Irene Nemirovsky had not been writing right up to the day of her arrest. She was working on a novelization of the war, to be called "Suite Francaise." For decades, her daughter Denise kept the leather-bound notebook of Irene's crabbed handwriting that she thought was a diary, unable to bring herself to read it. When she did, it turned out to contain two spell-binding novellas about the German occupation.

"Suite Francaise," translated by Sandra Smith, was published in 2006 and quickly became a best-seller. I picked up a remainder of the paperback edition at Books-a-Million for a few dollars and found it spell-binding.

"Storm in June" tells the story of refugees from Paris escaping the city as the Germans closed in and trying to find shelter in the countryside. The wealthy Pericands load their vehicle down with their precious silver and china, a mattress, embroidered linen, a pram for the baby, a bicycle, a basket for the cat. Their actions are repeated all over Paris:

"All along the Boulevard Delessert, groups of people appeared outside their houses — women, old people and children, gesticulating to one another, trying, at first calmly and then with increasing agitation and a mad, dizzy excitement, to get the family and all the baggage into a Renault, a saloon, a sports car…."

Art collector Charles Longelet cannot bear to leave behind his porcelain collection so he methodically packs it and brings it along. The Michauds, whose only son is fighting in the French army, pack sensibly but are left behind to fend for themselves when the bank manager they work for decides to put his mistress and her luggage in his car instead of them.

For weeks, these refugees seek shelter, food, water and safety, losing and finding possessions and family members, bartering, begging and bribing and even stealing to stay alive. What awaits them when they straggle back into Paris is ironic in some cases, poetic justice in others.

Part Two, "Dolce," takes place the next spring as the French village of Bussy is being occupied by the German army "for the third time since the defeat of France." The focus here is on the household of Madame Angellier and her daughter-in-law Lucile, who become unwilling hostesses to a German officer. Lucile's husband is a prisoner of war, and Madame Angellier treats both Lucile and their guest with barely contained hostility.

For Lucile is unhappily married and knows her husband was unfaithful before he was taken prisoner. Madame Angellier bregrudges her every mouthful of food: "Between these two women, every topic of conversation was a thorn bush they only approached with caution: if they reached out a hand, they risked getting hurt."

Their uneasy truce mirrors that of the French and the occupying soldiers. Behind their mask of civility, there are violent jealousies over the German soldiers who romance the French women, requisition their farm horses for battle and cherry-pick their best produce and crops. Even the demure Lucile is not immune to the German officer's charm.

Why did the French fall to the Germans so easily, and why was the French resistance so poor? With surprising sympathy, Irene Nemirovsky painted a portrait in words of a country unready and unwilling to fight after losing a generation of young men in World War I, and of German soldiers setting off to what they know is their doom on the Russian front.

That such a polished work of writing could have been created by Nemirovsky in her snatched moments makes her loss all the greater. What might she have created had she lived through the war rather than dying in Auschwitz when she was 39 years old?

Bibliophile Kathryn Smith writes book reviews regularly for the Independent Mail.