This is not one of those stories.
Instead, this is a story of survival, of guilt, of shame, and of collaboration.
When author Nicholas Shakespeare was young, he used to go with his parents to his aunt and uncle's house in rural England. His Aunt Priscilla always mystified and fascinated him at the same time. Who was this woman, really? He didn't find out until after she'd passed on and he was gifted with a treasure trove of her wartime letters, journals, and photographs.
Priscilla had been a British citizen living in France during the Occupation. But her documents revealed a very different person than what he'd previously thought.
In what must have been an exhausting search, he went to archives, followed leads, tried (and sometimes found) people who knew her. More and more of the puzzle began to fill in, but it was creating an astonishing picture. In short, if Priscilla had not returned back to England in 1944, after the liberation of France, she would have had her head shaved and been paraded around the town as a German collaborator.
It may be easy to immediately dismiss Priscilla after reading such a damning conviction. But that is one thing you simply cannot do when reading Shakespeare's remarkable book. For Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman Living in Wartime France shows just how blurred the lines of survival and collaboration were during this time of upheaval, especially for women.Priscilla's unconventional upbringing brought her to France at a young age to live with her mother, leaving her father, a noted BBC broadcaster, behind in England. Those formative years in France, especially exposed to the loose morality of her mother, left a mark on Priscilla. When Priscilla got pregnant out of wedlock and had an abortion, she chose marriage to a French aristocrat old enough to be her father to save her. It didn't. Priscilla wanted to be loved in all the ways a woman can be loved - but her husband couldn't provide it for her.
When the Germans came to France, Priscilla became part of a world where the line between friend and enemy was frazzled. At first, she tried to keep her head down, stay out of sight. But then she was put into Besancon, a concentration camp for British subjects where she suffered unspeakable conditions. After her release (who pulled the strings to release her?), she had affairs with numerous men, and some of them turned out to be connected to the highest members of the Nazi party. Was it a matter of survival that she became involved with these men, poor judgment, or a need to be loved? Was she blind to their activities? The record suggests not. Why, then, did she stay with them? It's a complicated question and one that has a multitude of answers.
What Shakespeare does, and does very well, is to ask a question about France itself. When the war was over, of course everyone was a patriot in France - just as everyone had been against Hitler and against the Nazi party in Germany. But this simply wasn't true. Priscilla symbolizes France in her bid to survive the war, and her own questionable, some would say unforgivable, decisions mirror those made by the French government and other French collaborators.
Written using a novelist's style with intimate details of life in Occupied France (and it is done very well considering Shakespeare is a noted novelist), Priscilla is a gripping read. Yet it challenges our notion of good and evil and more than anything makes us ask ourselves the question, "What would I have done?"
The answer may surprise you.
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