PARIS UNDERCOVER

Two women who took on the Nazis.

Paris-Underground, a 1943 bestseller, Book of the Month Club selection, and movie, describes two heroic women from the French Resistance. Journalist Goodman, author of The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team, tells what really happened, preserving some heroism while adding some painful details. The women themselves were middle-aged (not, needless to say, in the movie). Prosperous and living quietly, they were as shocked as the world was at the Allies’ sudden defeat in June 1940. Fleeing Paris along with several million others, they returned a few weeks later after the French surrender. Etta Shiber, the American author of Paris-Underground, was anxious not to make waves, but Kate Bonnefous, her assertive British companion, went to work. Already a Red Cross volunteer with a car and papers allowing free movement, she began visiting hospitals for injured Allied prisoners, purportedly to bring provisions but in fact to help them escape. Beginning in July she became a pioneer in a resistance organization that ultimately guided thousands of Allied servicemen across France and back to Britain. The women guided several dozen before their betrayal and arrest in November 1940. Sentenced to prison, Etta returned to the U.S. under an exchange in 1942. Kate received a death sentence, but it was commuted, and she survived the war, although barely. The final hundred pages describe their postwar lives while casting a gimlet eye on the accuracy of Shiber’s book. Written by ghostwriters, it was heavily fictionalized, full of suspense and events that never took place. Sadly, Bonnefous, then a prisoner, wasn’t fictionalized enough. Her thinly disguised name did not fool the Gestapo, who tortured her brutally in an attempt to get more information. The two never met after the war.

Genuine heroism and well told, with no Hollywood ending.