Resilience and Compassion : Surviving the Holocaust

Born into an ethnically Jewish family in Belgium, Dr. France Pruitt and her family had to flee to the South of France during WW II. After the war, the family moved to the U.S., where France completed her BA at Swarthmore College and her MA at SUNY at Buffalo. She also has a doctorate from La Sorbonne in Paris. Using her experiences and education, she opened international education offices in four universities. She writes about her family's often harrowing experiences as Jewish refugees from Nazism in the French mountains. This personal story is interwoven with well-informed accounts of the rise of Nazism, the German invasion and occupation of France, the nature of the local people who taught the family how to farm and kept their secret from the authorities, and the French Resistance Movement which saved their lives by finding families to hide them once the German army took over the south of France.