Our story does not begin in the stifling hot summer days of 1944, with the rumble of Allied tanks advancing along Parisian boulevards, the tears of joy pearling down young French women’s faces, and thousands of complete strangers kissing in celebration. It would be tempting to start then, but it would also be misleading. To understand the absolute elation of the summer of 1944, one that is difficult to put into words almost seventy-five years later, we need to feel the profound pain that preceded it, both mental and physical. And the sense of unbearable shame that accompanied it. To understand the ecstasy of those days, one cannot avoid looking into the haggard eyes of Parisians in May and June 1940, nor can one escape confronting the cataclysmic days before the brief war that led to the fall of France and the Nazi occupation.

Postwar Paris writers, artists, and thinkers cannot be fully appreciated without plunging first into the turmoil of Nazi occupation, which not only formed them but also informed their actions and thinking throughout their lives. Each experienced the war differently, but all endured it one way or another—whether at its epicenter, Paris, or at a distance, stranded in Vichy France or North Africa, or, in the harshest possible way, in prisoner-of-war or concentration camps in Germany, under the bombs in London, or by proxy, vicariously riveted to the news on the radio in the safety of New York, or finally by resolving to put an end to it through active combat. All of them were somehow reborn, their characters redefined, in those years of the war, and they later adopted Paris as their home precisely because of what they had been through.

Years later, three overlapping generations of renowned Paris residents could individually say: “War was my master, and Paris my school of life.”1