The Spiral Shell: A French Village Reveals its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II

Review\n"The Spiral Shell depicts two vivid journeys, one inward, as Sandell Morse explores her own identity as a Jew and one outward, as she pieces together the history of French Jews under the Vichy government. Each journey is fraught with reversals, full of unexpected details and betrayals at many levels... This is a necessary, illuminating and beautifully intelligent memoir."
- MARGOT LIVESEY, Author of Mercury and The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing\n"The Spiral Shell is an evocative, probing, heartfelt memoir, as rich in character and detail as the best fiction. injunction There are all kinds of reckonings here: personal, historical, spiritual. There is a vivid present as well as a vividly imagined past, a voice that is at turns charming, grieving, outraged and wry. Sandell Morse illuminates with wisdom and grace Eli Wiesel's timeless that, "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.""
- ALICE MCDERMOTT, Author of Charming Billy and The Bigamist's Daughter\n"It was a pleasure to read Sandell Morse's debut memoir...a sort of family detective story so many of us know...that provides much more than just answers. Elegant, erudite, passionate."
―ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write and Autobiographical Novel\nWhen granted a residency at an artists’ retreat in the picturesque village of Auvillar, in southwestern France, writer Sandell Morse noticed a puzzling lack of Jewish memorials and landmarks there that marked the resistance of local Jews against the Nazis. By gaining the friendship and confidence of the survivors and townspeople over years of research, interviews, and correspondence, Morse relates numerous accounts of bravery and selfless acts by those who chose to fight against bigotry, oppression, and genocide, in a moving and up-close look at a war also raging on a global scale.\nInspired by her determination to learn the truth - and with a fossilized spiral shell she’d found in the wall of the Jewish quarter in Paris as a talisman - Morse also writes of a deeper meaning and understanding of her own Jewish heritage in the context of her research on the war and the village.\nIn this year that marks the 80th anniversary of the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz, this memoir reflects on a harrowing time in our world’s history that still reverberates today, and provides a moving tribute to those who resisted.\nFrom the Back Cover\nIn this haunting memoir that reflects on the Holocaust and its legacy, award-winning author Sandell Morse discovers stories of bravery and resistance enacted during WWII in southern France. In the course of six years at a writing residency in France, during which she met with survivors and historians, she painstakingly pieces together the puzzle that had been beguiling her over the years: what was the real story of the French Jews under the Vichy government during the Second World War?
Driven by her dogged curiosity and determination to uncover the truth, and with a fossilized shell she’d found in the wall of the Jewish quarter in Paris as a talisman, she seeks deeper meaning and understanding of her own Jewish heritage.
By gradually gaining the trust of those she interviewed, Sandell reconstructs incidents of the civilians' extraordinary courage in resisting the Vichy regime and Nazi occupation.
From the survivors’ harrowing tales of escape, ingenious subterfuge, and just plain luck, she learns of a nunnery that was a safe-house for refugees; a rabbi who gave his life to save hundreds of Jewish children; the local gendarme who, endangering his own life, tipped the Resistance off to the upcoming Nazi roundups.
In this year that marks the 80th anniversary of the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz, this memoir reflects on a crucial time in our world’s history that still reverberates today and provides a moving tribute to those who resisted oppression and fascism.