Caroline Moorehead's latest book is A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France.One of her five best books on the French Resistance, as told to the Wall Street Journal:
Fashion Under the OccupationRead about another book on the list.
by Dominique Veillon (2002)
Occupation moved France rapidly from a country of plenty to one of penury. Within a few months, ration cards regulated nearly every aspect of life, a black market flourished and families were hungry. Belying the somewhatflippant title of "Fashion Under the Occupation," Dominique Veillon's book is an engrossing account of life during four years of French vassalage. Housewives spent their days queuing for food; bicycles replaced cars; women kept warm by putting mustard in their socks and wearing rabbit skin and squirrel muffs, clattering over cobblestones in wooden clogs. As more and more of France's food and resources were sent east to feed and clothe Germans, the French seized on the ersatz, experimenting with making clothes using hemp and reeds and bean stalks. This is social history at its most absorbing.
--Marshal Zeringue
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