Excerpt from Safe Passage by Ida Cook

..."In November, 1938, the first great concerted drive against the Jews began. This was sparked off by an event in Paris: a young German Jew shot an official at the German embassy. It was said that his parents had been ill-treated by the Geastapo, that his mind became unhinged and that he had shot the first German official he saw. Another story, told to us in Germany, was that the whole thing was a put-up job to inflame feelings against the Jews....True or false, this incident signalled the launching of the greatest pogroms in history. From that day, and for years to come, wave after wave of murder washed in a ghastly tide tide across Europe, until something like six million unfortunates had perished."

From Safe Passage, p. 115, by Ida Cook

Code Name Christine Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance

From p. 24:
"...Massive aerial bombardment of English cities began, in an attempt to break the morale of the civilian population. To everyone's surprise, Goering's enormous bombers were intercepted by nimble Spitfires, guided by a secret device, microwave radar, that we only learned about later. Unprecedented battles erupted in the sky; cities burned; German losses grew heavier; and Churchill's words expressed the anger and courage of the british people and their fierce pride at being the only country to stand up against Nazism."

From p. 26:
"...The armistice had partioned France into seven zones... They were:
#1 "Free Zone" (1940) in the south governed by Petain at Vichy. They in turn were governed by the Germans although there were no Germans in this zone until 1942 when the Allies invaded North Africa.
#2 "Occupied Zone" in the north, susposedly governed by Vichy but with Germans holding all the important offices. The demarcation line between zones one and two ran from Lake Geneva to the Spanish border cutting France in half."

Code Name Christine Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance

From page 19:
"...Hitler was preparing to invade England and his soldiers in Brittany readied themselves for the undertaking. Their ignorance surprised us (the local residents). One day a friend was looking through binoculars at the horizon. A German officier came up to her and asked to borrow the glasses- to see the English coast, he said."

"Rowboats from the port were requisitioned for exercises, but the Germans didn't know how to handle them. Under the amused eyes of the local people, they turned round and round, letting the oars drop into the water. The Ile du Chateau was chosen for landing maneuvers, and dummies were set up as targets representing the British. We watched all this through binoculors and enjoyed it enormously."

Code Name Christine Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance

p. 18: The following are examples of posted German propaganda against England throughout Brittany:
"...The Germans did everything they could to stir up hatred against England: "treacherous ex-ally"..."hereditary enemy", ..."perfidious Albion".

Code Name Christine Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance

From page 11:
"It was an unbelievable sight, a long, slow, jostling river of trucks and wagons, sleek cars and jalopies, all piled high with furniture and cherished possessions, from a bird cage to a grandmother clock to a statue of the Virgin Mary. There were stalled cars surrounded by distraught families, cars turned over in ditches. There were soldiers who had thrown away their weapons as they trudged along...there was a cyclist with his dog bound to the luggage rack like a parcel...we spent as much time stopped as moving... (the people said) they had been in bomb attacks and seen terrible slaughter. German Stukas would dive down, their sirens shreiking, drop their bombs and disappear...the Italians had also started bombing refugee columns and defensless towns. Italy entered the war June 10, 1940."

Code Name Christine Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance

Translated by Jane Kielty Stott, p. 10

"...Thus I became part of the general flight southward- the Exodus, as it came to be called, an estimated 10 million refugees on the roads of France that June (1940)...in our minds at that time the biggest fear was that the pattern of (the) WWI would be repeated; the German Army would cut northern France off from the rest of the country and subject it to a brutal occupation. Until mid-June of 1940, no one- not even the most pessimistic person thought that the whole of France would surrender, and so we fled south to avoid the fate of those who had stayed home in the last war."

Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood

By Brian Thompson, 2006. The following quote is from p. 32:

"...But war had brought out the animal in children."

A Chance to Live: A Family's Journey to Freedom

"...The next morning I walked up to the imposing entrance tower (at Chateau de Valencay) at the appointed time... My new friend was waiting for me at the agte and took me inside. As we entered the main ballroom I could hardly believe my eyes. It was filled with hundreds of sculptures. Some were still in their crates, others had been partially unpacked, and still others were completely out in the open, as if on display. My friend explained that I was looking at art treasures from the Louvre Museum in Paris that had been evacuated before the Nazi invasion to safe locations throughout the French countryside. The Chateau de Vanencay sheltered the sculpture collection. Here it was safe and protected from bombardment, fire, vandalism and theft by Nazi scavengers. My friend was the curator in charge."

The above quote was from Kohnstam's book page 135.

A Chance to Live: A Family's Journey to Freedom

"...The five of us survivors proceeded to shake the hands of the heroes who had worked together to bring us to safety...It was admirable how these French Resistance fighters had planned, organized and improvised our escape. They had risked their lives, their families, and their livlihoods for us. It moved me deeply that, in a time of betrayal and selfishness, there were still decent, courageous human beings who fought dictatorship and persecution in the best way they could- by helping others reach freedom."

From Pieter Kohnstam's book, A Chance to Live: A Family's Journey to Freedom. Above quote from page 108.

The following excerpt from Pieter Kohnstam's book A Chance to Live: A Family's Journey to Freedom. "...I have survived. And as a survivor I am a witness. If this survival of the horrors that are summoned up today in the term Holocaust, is to have any purpose, then it is above all that of keeping awake the memory of the unimaginable, to prevent forgetting and repression andto build all this into the vision of a better future, where such things or anything like them can never happen agaon anywhere in this world." Simon Wiesenthal