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"This story has haunted me since I was a child."
So begins Anne Sinclair in her best-selling personal account about her journey to find answers about her own life and that of her grandfather Léonce Schwartz.
In the Shadows of Paris is part memoir, part historical document revealing a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust. On 12 December 1941, the Nazis carried out a mass arrest-in French the word is
rafle, but there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror-of
einflussreiche Juden, as the Germans put it. For that there is an equivalent: "influential Jews."
Those doctors, professors, artists and others at the upper levels of French society were then imprisoned less than fifty miles from Paris in the Royallieu-Compiègne concentration camp. Those who did not perish in Frontstalag 122 were deported by the infamous cattle cars to Auschwitz and other death camps, except for the few to escape that fate. Léonce Schwartz was one of them.
About the author
Anne Sinclair was born in New York City and then moved to France with her family as a young girl, where she rose to fame in part due to her family's prominence in the world of art collecting, but also due to her beauty and social grace which led her to serve as the model on which statues of Marianne, the national emblem of France, were sculpted. From 1984 to 1997 she was host of France's enormously popular Sunday night news-talk show "7 sur 7", during which time she interviewed many world figures including Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, Hillary Clinton, and Prince Charles, as well as celebrities. More recently, she founded the
Huffington Post in France. She is the author of numerous bestsellers on politics in France and is sought-after for commentary on international current events, Jewish culture, and fine art.
