BOOK BITS - "AVENUE OF SPIES" by Alex Kershaw - A true story of a family heroic resistance in Nazi occupied Paris - Or, from a different perspective, how one selfish woman brought tragedy to her husband and son

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The carnage of World War Two was unleashed because of those who wanted peace at any cost.  They deliberately refused to believe Hitler's plans as detailed on his book Mein Kampf, or My Struggle.  These days liberals refuse to believe those who warn of Islam's expansionist, supremacist, and brutal nature, as clearly exposed in the Koran's own words.  By coincidence, the word Jihad translates as "struggle".

"Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris" by Alex Kershaw 

The author's narrative is presented as the story of a family's heroism and resistance.  As a reader I saw the drama of how one woman's selfishness brought suffering and tragedy to her husband and child. 

 

Imagine Toquette, almost thirty years old, a Swiss nurse living in Paris, not attractive at all, and at 28 years old already a spinster, who luckily meets a tall and ruggedly handsome American doctor, Sumner Jackson, a good man. 

There are four photographs of her on this book and in all of them she has her head lowered, frowning, looking up, her lips pursed in anger, as if furious about something.  She looks like that even in happy times while on the beach with her husband and a puppy, and in another photo with her husband and small child.    
 

But inexplicably he falls in love with her and marries her.  It was the late twenties and the thirties in Europe and things were rather unsettling, so he takes her to the United States to live a peaceful life as a doctor's wife.  But she hates it in America.  What was it in Paris that she missed so much in these tumultuous times?  Who knows.

 

Back in France the situation is extremely hard for Sumner, who must study medicine all over again to be allowed to work as a doctor in France.  Imagine the sacrifice, the wasted years of study.  All for Toquette, because he loves her, while she hates America.

They have a child, Phillip, a beautiful boy.  But that's still not a good enough reason for her to leave Paris for a safer life in the USA.  No.  She makes her husband and child stay even as the Nazis invade France. 

They stay even as the United States gets involved in the war and the family is liable to be rounded up and interned at any time.  They stay. Because she loves Paris or something in that city that she can't give up. 

 

They live right inside the maw of the enemy, in the elegant Avenue Foch, where the Gestapo and other Nazi agencies of persecution and torture were located just meters away from the Jacksons' home. 

They stayed, while Sumner worked as a surgeon at the American Hospital in Paris and the city starved.  They stayed even as Americans were rounded up and placed in concentration camps.  They stayed.  Because she wanted to.

 

In the meantime, not finding all that risk and wartime hardship enough for the family, in the summer of 1943 Toquette agrees to join the resistance and gets her husband embroiled in it too.  Agents come and go using the doctor's home as a center for exchanging messages.  Sometimes Sumner helps a ring that hides downed Allied airmen to be later on smuggled out across the border and into safety.   All that within meters of Nazi agencies of police, espionage and torture on Avenue Foch. 

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The French try to restore their lost honor. 

The French resistance was essentially an effort to restore at least a little honor to a France that had behaved so dishonorably during the Nazi invasion and occupation. 

 

*  The French army had not fought hard enough to stop the Nazis.  Some speculate that it was because Stalin ordered the French Communists not to fight too hard against the Nazis, who had signed a friendship pact with the Soviet Union.  

 

*  Then there was the very shameful collaboration of the Petain government with the Nazis. 

 

*  And furthermore there was Marshall Petain and his cohorts' persecution of Jews that went beyond the Nazis wildest expectations.  Tens of thousands of French and foreign Jews, including children, were rounded up by French police and sent to Auschwitz.

 

While leading an army in exile General De Gaulle exhorted the French to resist.  Some followed his call, particularly after the Americans had entered the war and it was clear that they would eventually liberate Europe and become the new masters. 

 

A large majority of the French people, however, collaborated actively or passively with the Germans. 

 

The French resistance was not only largely ineffectual but counterproductive.

 

*  First of all, it was essentially a nuisance campaign against the Germans.  It did not accomplish anything  commensurate with the sacrifice of so many resistance heroes.  Agents were all too often betrayed, then arrested, tortured, and executed.  Innocent people of all ages were murdered in the thousands in retaliation by the infuriated Nazis.

 

*  Second, being mostly composed of Communists (by now the Nazis and the Soviets were no longer friends), the maquis (the armies of the resistance) never got much weaponry or supplies from the Allies, who feared that empowering the Communists would facilitate their takeover of France after the war.  So thousands of resistance fighters in the mountains and other parts of France waged a frustrating and protracted campaign with not enough Allied appreciation or assistance.

 

On May 25, 1944 the Jackson family was arrested on suspicion of working for the resistance and sent to concentration camps.  While not tortured and executed as was the standard operating procedure in these cases (did they have friends in high places?) all three of them suffered enormously from cold, hunger, thirst, and disease.  And one of them was Toquette's teenage son.  Now, what kind of mother would put her child at such risk so that she can live in Paris and have the exciting life of a secret agent?

 

Their story does not end well.  Sumner Jackson died along with hundreds of other prisoners from an Allied bombing attack.  

After much suffering his 17-year-old son Phillip managed to survive against many odds and join the Allied army as a translator (see image). 

Toquette, along with other concentration camp inmates, gained asylum in Sweden in the last days of the war.  She lived a long life.

 

It is a telling note that Phillip did not go to see his mother for more than a year after her liberation.  Did he blame her for his father's loss and for his and Sumner's horrible ordeal in concentration camps, where he almost died?

 

The writer tells us a story of heroism, but what this reader got is a tale of a family with a domineering and selfish mother who made her husband's life miserable, got him captured and killed, and almost caused the death of her own son.  

 

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Avenue Foch today.  The Jacksons lived on  the ground floor of #11,

somewhere on the foreground on this picture, as seen from the Arc de Triomphe

 

 

 

Sumner and Toquette's son Phillip with his daughter. 

He lives in Paris.

 

 

 

 

 During the occupation of Paris life went on for French women

 and their Nazi friends.

 

 

 

 

 
France was divided in two, with a collaboration government in the so-called Free Zone.  With Marshall Petain at its head, the French government was essentially an enthusiastic puppet of the Nazi occupier.