Is your 401(k) tanking? Are you worried about your fortune and future? Here's an antidote: French art historian Agnes Humbert's journal/memoir of her harrowing experiences as a Resistance member in Paris and as a Nazi slave laborer. Humbert was lucky, sort of -- most of her compatriots were tortured and killed.
But good God, what she went through -- months in icy, putrid cells and years toiling 18 hours a day, every day, in Reich factories under lethal conditions.
When it ended, she helped the liberators -- including a kind-hearted American sergeant she dubbed St. George -- restore sanity to a brutal, brutalized region.
Somehow, Humbert retained her fierce spirit, wry wit and strong compassion throughout her hellish ordeal, and that is what makes "Resistance" most fascinating. After meeting her, you'll never crack another nasty joke about the French being weak-kneed.
Yes, all this happened 60-some years ago and Humbert has been dead since 1963, but her rediscovered and newly translated account, like Ken Burns' recent PBS series "The War," powerfully reminds us of how tenuous are the buttresses of civilization and how privileged we are to have nothing more to worry about than our money and our stuff.
PAMELA MILLER
