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The Moon in Splinters: Searching for Maurice Pertschuk, British Secret agent in the French Resistance
One moonless night in 1942, a handsome 20-year-old British SOE lieutenant, Maurice Pertschuk, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur with orders to report to the French resistance. Three years later he’d be hanged at Buchenwald, just 13 days before its liberation, within earshot of approaching Allied guns. Friends rescued the sheaf of poems he’d scribbled on scavenged paper and published them in 1946 as “Leaves of Buchenwald.”
What had happened, his young niece wondered, to this young poet? A seemingly impenetrable silence hung around the subject.
Only after her mother’s death did this niece dare look for answers. In The Moon in Splinters she revisits Maurice’s haunts, tracks down survivors and interviews their families. A portrait emerges of a slight, brilliant, romantic intellectual; of gentle disposition, yet tough, full of “imaginative audacity,” who organized a vast, yet to date largely forgotten, resistance network in southern France.
After the Germans occupied the whole of France, London ordered his team to blow up a Toulouse explosive factory, but a double agent caught wind of the plot. Maurice and 16 others were betrayed, arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald.
The Moon in Splinters follows twists and turns in the discoveries, the disappointments and the revelations - all interwoven with Maurice’s reconstructed story. It leads to a surprise ending, even more sinister than the one historians tell.
What had happened, his young niece wondered, to this young poet? A seemingly impenetrable silence hung around the subject.
Only after her mother’s death did this niece dare look for answers. In The Moon in Splinters she revisits Maurice’s haunts, tracks down survivors and interviews their families. A portrait emerges of a slight, brilliant, romantic intellectual; of gentle disposition, yet tough, full of “imaginative audacity,” who organized a vast, yet to date largely forgotten, resistance network in southern France.
After the Germans occupied the whole of France, London ordered his team to blow up a Toulouse explosive factory, but a double agent caught wind of the plot. Maurice and 16 others were betrayed, arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald.
The Moon in Splinters follows twists and turns in the discoveries, the disappointments and the revelations - all interwoven with Maurice’s reconstructed story. It leads to a surprise ending, even more sinister than the one historians tell.
342 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 1, 2025
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August 11, 2025
This book -- written by the Maurice Pertschuk' niece, does multiple tasks and does them all incredibly well. Working off scraps of family stories, Whiteside seeks to retrace the circuitous underground path of her Uncle Maurice in France during World War II. Her research both in archives on paper and on the road seeking out survivors, veterans and families, is comprehensive. And in French!
She deftly weaves her personal research quest (including the feelings some of the discoveries provoked) into the historical narrative. Not only telling Maurice's courageous story -- and those of his comrades -- but refuting the falsehoods of an arrogant British "historian" who got it all wrong.
A very intimate, dramatic retelling of the dangerous work of the underground during Nazi occupation.
She deftly weaves her personal research quest (including the feelings some of the discoveries provoked) into the historical narrative. Not only telling Maurice's courageous story -- and those of his comrades -- but refuting the falsehoods of an arrogant British "historian" who got it all wrong.
A very intimate, dramatic retelling of the dangerous work of the underground during Nazi occupation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review