The Witch of the Breton Woods, Guest Post by Jennifer Ivy Walker

Traumatized by horrors witnessed during the Nazi invasion of France, a young woman retreats to the dense Breton woods where she becomes a member of the clandestine French Resistance. When she finds a critically injured American paratrooper whose plane was shot down, she shelters the wounded soldier in her secluded cottage, determined to heal him despite the enormous risk.

Ostracized by villagers who have labeled her a witch, she is betrayed by an informant who reports to the Butcher—the monstrous leader of the local paramilitary organization that collaborates with the Germans. As the enemy closes in, she must elude the Gestapo while helping the Resistance reunite the American with his regiment and join the Allied Forces in the Battle of Brittany.

Can true love triumph against all odds under the oppressive Third Reich?

The Origins of the French Resistance

During World War II, Germany invaded France and divided the country into two zones: la Zone Cccupée–the Occupied Zone of the north, which included Paris, and la Zone Libre –the Free Zone, which included the south of France where a government known as the Vichy Regime collaborated with the Nazis.

In June 1940, after France fell to the Germans, French General Charles de Gaulle formed Free France, a government in exile based in London which joined the Allied Forces in combating the Nazis. His famous broadcast known as the Appeal of the 18^th of June 1940 encouraged the French people to resist the Germans and join the Free French Forces.

The French Resistance was a clandestine organization that sabotaged the Germans and aided the Allies by seizing bridges, blowing up railroads, intercepting supplies, blocking telecommunications, collecting intelligence on German units, publishing underground newspapers, and smuggling Jews and injured Allied soldiers out of occupied areas and to safety through integrated escape networks. The emblem of the French Resistance was the Cross of Lorraine, signifying the territory which had been lost to the Germans but regained with the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. The Cross of Lorraine became the symbol for reclaiming all of France from the Germans.

One of the heroes of the French Resistance was Jean Moulin, who succeeded in unifying the main networks of the underground movement. He was captured and tortured to death by Klaus Barbie, the German SS Officer infamously known as “The Butcher of Lyon”, in 1943.

The FFI–les Forces françaises de l’ Intérieur– played a significant role in the Allies’ rapid advance through France after the D-Day invasion on 6 June 1944. The French Resistance was politically and morally important to France during and after the German occupation, in sharp contrast to the collaborationism of the Vichy régime.

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Meet Jennifer Ivy Walker

Jennifer Ivy Walker has an MA in French literature and is a former high school teacher and professor of French at a state college in Florida. Her novels encompass a love for French language, literature, history, and culture, incorporating her lifelong study, summers abroad, and many trips to France.

The Witch of the Breton Woods is heart-pounding suspense set during WWII in Nazi-occupied France, where a young woman in the French Resistance shelters and heals a wounded American soldier, hiding him from the Gestapo and the monstrous Butcher who are relentlessly hunting him.