Sisters in Resistance ★★★★★
Tilar Mazzeo
Grand Central Publishing
Canadian-American historian Tilar Mazzeo has a particular talent for writing what she thinks of as “hidden histories”. Not that she disputes literary critics who deem her previous New York Times bestselling works, including The Secret of Chanel No 5, The Hotel on Place Vendome, and Irena’s Children, to be “cultural histories”. As this 51-year-old author, wine writer and associate professor at Université de Montreal University puts it, “culturally, women’s lives are always hidden histories in terms of a larger historical narrative. So I work at that intersection of women and stories of women in resistance.”
Like many of her previous works, her new and sixth historical narrative, Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker’s Wife, and Mussolini’s Daughter Outwitted the Nazis deals with the Second World War period. And it is arguably one of the most astonishing “hidden histories” to emerge from that era, as it unravels the largely unknown story of this unlikely alliance. And, indeed, a close friendship forged between Mussolini’s favourite daughter, Edda, a young Nazi spy called Hilde Beetz, and a middle-aged American socialite, Frances de Chollet.
The catalyst for these women’s unlikely alliance — and pivotal to this gripping narrative — is the story of Edda Mussolini’s playboy husband, Galeazzo Ciano, and his infamous tell-all diaries. Documenting his time as Italy’s foreign minister and Mussolini’s second-in-command, they are unsparing in his criticism of Hitler, von Ribbentrop and others. By 1943, two rival Nazi factions, the Italians, the Americans, and the British were engaged in a race to get their hands on the Ciano diaries, which are considered one of most important documents of WW2. The first instalment of the diaries covering 1939 to 1943 was published in the Chicago Daily News in 1945, and later served as crucial evidence at Nuremberg. They are also the documents for which these three women risked their lives and their families.
Mazzeo had long known of the Ciano diaries, along with Edda’s efforts in smuggling them into Switzerland — with the help of her former lover, Emilio Pucci, who was tortured by the Gestapo and became a famous fashion designer after the war. But it wasn’t until a chance 2012 meeting in Provence, France, with Frances de Chollet’s daughter, Jacqueline, now in her 80s, that Mazzeo learnt of Frances’s extraordinary role in securing the Ciano diaries for the Americans. A role that had been written out of history. “The information kind of percolated away in the back of my mind, and Jacqueline and I ended up being friends, we’d see each other and talk about her mother’s stories,” says Mazzeo.
She even tried, unsuccessfully, through the Freedom of Information Act, to see if there were any US government files on Frances — who had been enlisted as an amateur agent in Switzerland by one of the pioneers of American spycraft, Allen Dulles. Later she also wrote a short article on the Ciano diaries for the Wall Street Journal. But it wasn’t until the “library gods” intervened a few years later and she came across declassified CIA files on Hilde Beetz, recounts Mazzeo, “that I realised all these little pieces of different stories that had been running around at the back of my mind were actually one story”.
In that moment says Mazzeo: “I understood there was a way to tell the story that captured its historical complexity, but was also something that a reader could follow, because it’s a very complicated story. It’s sort of an almost unbelievable spy romp at certain moments.” Indeed, Sisters in Resistance so potently captures the intrigue, suspense and multiple twists of that tangled historical episode it’s already being hailed as akin to a spy thriller. Yet it owes much of its power to Mazzeo's penchant as an historian, “to tell historical stories that are character centered”.
Yet Mazzeo is also at pains to caution her readers that it is a book “about the moral thicket, about a group of people — and a group of nations — lost in darkness”. And while she documents the extraordinary courage that Edda, Ciano and Hilde all summon to make a midlife correction away from that darkness, Mazzeo insists her book is not asking forgiveness for them. “How do you write the story of somebody who begins to commit crimes and then realises that they have done the wrong thing? And they do all risk their lives to try to undo the thing they’ve done, but they can’t. With the exception of Frances de Chollet, they do have blood on their hands in some ways. They are morally culpable for the tragedy that was the Second World War and the Holocaust.”
Mazzeo attributes her passion for the Second World War era to “the idea that there are parts of stories that have been hidden until recently. There is a kind of urgency about WW2 history in the sense that materials are being declassified now — for the first time in many cases — at the same time as many of the first-hand historical witnesses are passing. For instance, Jacqueline de Chollet is in her 80s and she remembers the night her mother and Edda and the US government photographed Ciano’s diaries in the house she lived in. So there’s this feeling that you’re doing real history at this moment of urgency.”
But Sisters in Resistance also packs an urgent historical punch of a different kind. “Part of what Ciano says in those diaries is that fascism was a disaster for Italy, and yet it looks like Italy will again repeat its flirtation with fascism. The American in me recognises that the US is flirting with fascism, so the book, is sadly, very timely,” says Mazzeo. “In writing it, I focused on just telling the story, but I don’t think you can read it and not come to the conclusion that there are clear parallels with our present moment.”
TILAR MAZZEO ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER
Stéphane Hessel's Time for Outrage! was first published as Indignez-Vous! in France in 2010 where sold millions of copies. It was then published in the US and Europe as Time for Outrage! Hessel was a French diplomat and concentration camp survivor who fought in the French resistance and he writes the book as a letter to the younger generation. He says this is what the rise of Fascism looks like. He lays out what he thinks the conditions are: an economic crisis, a rise in nationalism, a rise in anti-immigration rhetoric, fears of the internal enemy — and says "these are all the things that I saw happening in the 1930s, and that I see now, and I’m telling you that now is the moment you must be outraged". It inspired the Indignados movement in Spain, and the Occupy Wall Street movement was largely inspired by it too. So it’s this very small book with this incredible political resonance that a decade ago tried to warn of what we are now seeing. And I would list that as my number one most influential book. It's a book that will increase your sense that we are living at the crossroads of history.
The Sovereign Individual, co-authored by James Dale Davison and Lord William Rees-Mogg. The significant author here is Rees-Mogg — the father of British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg — and I encourage everybody to only buy it second-hand so there are no royalties produced. It is not a book that says things I like. It was written in the '90s and imagined what was going to happen with the rise of the internet and the ways in which that was going to reconfigure the nation state. But it is an incredibly prescient and terrifying book, because it has largely come to pass in certain ways, and not by accident or because he was a tarot card reader. But because it’s a book that has been adopted by a number of very powerful people in the intellectual cultural sector, primarily out of Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, for example. I think it is an accurate account of what has happened over the past 20 years, and it is part of the reason I’m glad I’m a dual citizen.
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey was published in 1951, and is about a Scotland Yard detective and how he unravels the story of this woman’s life. I would say my writing style has been influenced by Tey's early detective novels and others in the Golden Age of British fiction. But this book is a particularly amazing and brilliantly written detective novel. Whenever I think about how to write stories — and when I came to write Sisters in Resistance — I think about what it means to write about history as a kind of detective story. For me that’s a powerful idea; that what we are doing is uncovering not just facts, but also motivations and the parts of the story that haven’t been told and how you piece together a narrative.
Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls is a kids' book that made me cry as a child. It’s the story about a boy and his grandfather and his friendship with his hunting dogs. When I was reading this story recently with my kids, I asked myself why did this story have me weeping as a 12 or 13 year old? Why did I find this story as upsetting and deeply moving as I did? And it’s because Rawls is also talking about the ways in which history is generational, and about intergenerational trauma and how it can be healed. It’s also a book which allows kids to process things they cannot talk about. And I think it’s part of why I write the books I do. As writers we write the stories that we were drawn to as a child. Not only am a child of the Cold War, I’m also a child of the post-Vietnam War era. I fundamentally grew up in a context of intergenerational war trauma that we were never allowed to speak about. So I write the stories of war and trauma that were never told.
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a biography based on the diaries of Martha Ballard who, in the late 18th-early 19th century, was a midwife working in the American state of Maine. It was published in 2015 and won the Pulitzer Prize - and it’s the kind of history I aspire to write. It’s about what it was to be simply a midwife who went from town to town through snowstorms helping women deliver their babies and bury their children. It’s a great example of how we can take what appears to be the stories of mundane and average people and, if you are sensitive enough to the fabric of human history, you’ll find amazing stories. These are diaries that had sat for 100 years in a local archive and all it took was a good storyteller to realise that behind these diaries was a story of a whole community, a whole nation. I learnt a lot about how to write narrative non-fiction from that book, which speaks to the essence of cultural history; the idea that the stories of individual lives can tell the larger stories of culture in important and critical ways.
