The Resistance Between Us: Ingrid's Wars. Cet article n’est pas disponible.The Resistance Between Us: Ingrid's Wars

The Résistance Between Us is written in the first person. The full intimacy of the protagonist’s personality: her open heart, and the immediacy of her feelings, reach the reader directly. It is a tough, realistic account of a conscientious life ultimately well-lived. It is serious fiction, far closer to the literary vein of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française than any of today’s World War II fiction novels, and not unlike the visual integrity of the film, The Saving of Private Ryan. The narrator/heroine, Ingrid de Vochard Fellner, is an alluring, wealthy widow, a philanthropist, who lives in the small, fictional town of Duchamps, along the Doubs River, at the heart of a small part of Occupied France, located somewhere near the real city of Besançon, and within sight of the Jura Mountains. As the book opens, the Doubs River delivers two dead bodies to Ingrid’s riverbank one morning, and she discovers them, a young couple with yellow stars on their coats. An encounter there with the coordinator of the local Résistance compels her to join the group. She shields Jews and political refugees in her basement while they wait to pass to Italy and Switzerland. She entertains the enemy upstairs to guarantee the safety of her Old Testament visitors downstairs. Ingrid hides the agony she lives with as Gestapo stop by on covert raids. Her neighbors and friends suspect she’s a collaborator because the Nazis come to visit; they hate her for it, and gossip widely. She lives through lessons that assault her body, mind and soul. We know what she’s lost in this clandestine battle; we enter her world and applaud any success over the monsters who stalk and rape her. Her home yields no comfort; she doesn’t need tranches: her body is her battlefield. She does all the things she said she never, ever, would. Liberation comes at book’s end. However, Ingrid stands alone in a courtroom, head shaved, tondue and pariah—charged with Treason.

Phyllis Kimmel Libby, visual artist and writer, has taught home-based Neuro-Developmental therapy to families of brain-injured children in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Australia and Japan since 1977. Her family: Odessa Jews, Czech Catholics and Hungarian Lutherans, were musicians, sculptors, goldsmiths, teachers, visual artists, farmers and writers. She embraced their harrowing stories and those of her WWII survivors: her late husband, the French who kept secret about Jews in hiding, and saw Oradour-Sur-Glane a few hours after its infamous massacre-and many of her readers of international backgrounds. She spent days living with a Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz. Phyllis's long-standing friendships with families and colleagues across the globe have given her a lifetime of insight into the human heart.