THE COST OF COURAGE

This heroic true story of the three youngest children of a bourgeois Catholic family who worked together in the French Resistance is told by an American writer who has known and admired the family for five decades

In the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle's military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. André survived three concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciliation of France and Germany. His parents and oldest brother were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and died in the camps. Since then, silence has been the Boulloches's answer to dealing with the unbearable. This is the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal. CHARLES KAISER is an au-thor, journalist, and blogger. He was born in Washington DC and grew up there and in Albany, New York; Dakar, Sen-egal; London, England; and Windsor, Connecticut. He is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. His articles have also appeared in New York, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Vogue, among many other publica-tions. His previous books, 1968 in America (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) and The Gay Metropolis (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), remain in print from Grove Press. “Even now, almost three quarters of a century after the second world war, the role played by the French resistance in German occupied and Vichy France is often overlooked. Charles Kaiser has not only unearthed the story of an extraordinary family, but set it against a world in which courage, selflessness and resilience were of greater importance than personal survival and collaboration, however trivial. It makes for a fascinating book.” —Caroline Moorehead, author of A Train In Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance In Occupied France “One legacy of the Nazi occupation of France was secrecy, a shield that long hid the heroism of resisters no less than the shame of collaborators. In this gripping true-life drama, Charles Kaiser reveals the long-buried story of one prosperous Parisian family that paid a high price for the bravery of its children. Until now, only through silence could they live with the painful cost of their courage.” —Alan Riding, author of And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris “A very compelling story.” —Robert O. Paxton, author of Vichy France “Charles Kaiser deserves a Legion of Honor red ribbon for bringing to vibrant life the suspenseful, never-before-told true story of a family's courage, suffering and ultimate triumph amid the existential dangers and challenges of the French Resistance. Chapeau!” —Hendrik Hertzberg, author of Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004 “Charles Kaiser aims to convey not only what happened during the period but what it felt like at the time. A summoning up of traumas past, a lament for paradise lost.” —New York Times (A New York Times Notable Book of the Year) “Brisk, splashy, dishy Kaiser is a gifted popular historian who manages to suggest something of the flavor of gay life in different de-cades and to convey effectively the gradual changes in gay peoples' self-images and social status.” —Washington Post