Desiree Reads’s Reviews > A Woman is Witness: A Paris Diary > Status Update

(June 16, 1940)

"The loud-speakers roar that the Maginot Line was broken through yesterday. Verdun taken. The Italians in Nice."

"(O)ut of the plane climbed a German officer, who greeted a group of other German officers... 'Reporting for duty in German Paris!'"

(June 14, 1940)

"Infantryman Bernard Groux... shot dead the commander of the first Nazi division that set foot on the soil of Paris...

"But Infantryman Bernard Groux, who would mot see a Nazi in Paris... will not be forgotten. When the shame grows unbearable, people will remember..."

(June 11, 1940)

" I woke up at six o'clock in the morning and thought it was night. That was how dark it was. At first I thought there was a storm, but it wasn't thunder, it was the noise of guns, and the darkness was smoke, not fog."

(June 9, 1940)

"Radio report: the Nazis in Pontoise... 'Paris has been declared an open city.'"

(May 18, 1940)

"Does it only seem do to me, or have the people of Paris turned pessimistic overnight?"

(Sep 3, 1939)

"We've declared war'"

April 26 (1939)
"We've been listening to Hitler's Reichstag speech... Perhaps only an Austrian can tell what a swindler the man is. Because only an Austrian can hear how he still talks typical Austrian dialect but tries frantically to hide it and change it into a North German accent."

🤔

"It was under him that the Maginot Line... had been built; the world possessed no more magnificent line of fortifications."

😬

May 22