Band of Sisters
Madeleine Pauliac, the Women of the Blue Squadron, and Their Daring Rescue Missions in the Last Days of World War II
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Band of Sisters tells the dramatic story of Madeleine Pauliac, a French army doctor, and a group of Red Cross nurses--known as the Blue Squadron. At the request of Charles DeGualle, the group was sent to rescue French soldiers and civilians who had been captured, injured, or stranded during World War II. Written from letters, diary entries and interviews, the book recounts their rescue missions in Germany, Russia, and Poland in 1945, in the final days of the war and in the first months after the German defeat.
It's a previously unknown story of heroism and daring by a remarkable group of women, none more brave and intrepid than Pauliac herself, who was the author's aunt that he would never know.
About this Author
Philippe Maynial is a film executive turned writer and the nephew of Madeline Pauliac, the main character of the narrative. Before he embarked on his research into his aunt's experiences in World War II, Maynial spent his entire career in the film industry. He currently resides in France.
Richard Bernstein has been a prominent journalist and writer for forty years, first with Time magazine, then for a quarter of a century at The New York Times, and currently as a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. His foreign assignments for The Times included the posts of bureau chief at the United Nations, the Paris bureau, and Berlin. For six years, he was one of the paper's daily book critics.
Reviews
Madeline Pauliac, the intrepid leader of the Blue Squadron, a task force of nurses who in the final year of WWII crisscrossed newly liberated Europe in search of French citizens freed from Nazi camps, takes center stage in this evocative debut history from her nephew. As a medical doctor, Pauliac had run a refugee orphanage in Paris during the war (the basis for the 2016 film Les Innocentes) while working secretly for the Resistance; she was eventually made a doctor-lieutenant in the French Army. In 1944, de Gaulle commissioned her to find French citizens who had been caught in the Nazi camp system, and she took command of the Blue Squadron--11 young women with a few ambulances. After scouring American-occupied Germany, the group made a more fraught crossing into Soviet-occupied territory and the U.S.S.R. (where some POWs had been relocated). Conditions on the Soviet side were more grueling due to scarce resources and Soviet suspicion of the French, who they viewed as Nazi collaborators. The women faced threats of rape and had to rely on their wits and wiles to reclaim French citizens. Pauliac, who cuts a dashing figure in Maynial's reverent account, returned to Poland in 1946 to found a care home for nuns who had been raped and impregnated by Soviet soldiers. She died in Poland that year, in a car accident during her honeymoon. Readers will be engrossed by this stylishly written and winsome portrait in fortitude.
Philippe Maynial recounts the journeys of these women so magnificently, that he gives hope to those who fight for freedom.
This book is a passionate account of the life journey of these heroines. It is admirable of the author to have crafted this work of memory, which is an affectionate recognition of the commitment of women.
Beautifully and movingly told by Madeleine Pauliac#39;s nephew, Philippe Maynial, who knows her story better than anyone, this is recounting of an all-too-brief life will break and mend the heart.
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