Jeremy Harding writes:

Her book is disparate, fitful, but in the end a convincing piece of history drawing heavily on contemporary accounts in a handful of published memoirs. Witnesses include Beauvoir, Werth, Georges Sadoul, the historian of cinema, and Georges Adrey, a trade unionist whose memoir of the ordeal was subtitled ‘Notes and Impressions of a Parisian Metalworker during the Exodus’. To these Diamond adds the memories of an interviewee who was 16 when she fled from her village near Paris in 1940 and an unpublished diary kept by a secretary at the Ministry of the Interior. Fleeing Hitler also looks beyond the refugee columns at the arguments raging within the French cabinet as the disaster unfolded, and later at the national story devised by Vichy, which would portray the ‘exodus’ as a journey through suffering to patriotic enlightenment.

(LRB 8 May 2008)

Oxford | hardback 255 pp. |ISBN: 9780192806185