George Burnell

Beating the Odds: a Boyhood Under Nazi-occupied France George Burnell

The book is about what can happen when the international community ignores a power-hungry dictator who schemes and plots the destruction of free and civilized countries. The date was September 3, 1939. The dictator: Adolf Hitler. The nations: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, England, and the United States. An American psychiatrist, who spent his youth in France during WWII, uses his keen insight into the human condition to write about the politics and history of that period. He provides a clear picture of what it was like to grow up in Vichy France under the constant threat of being denounced by collaborators. Despite repeated narrow escapes from the Gestapo and the French police, the boy shares many humorous situations that brought laughter and joy in a family on the run throughout the war years. Using little known published sources, the book also provides unique information about the trials of the top three French war criminals responsible for his father's deportation to Auschwitz and his mother's arrest and escape from prison. The book also reveals important but controversial decisions made by President Roosevelt, Premier Churchill, Generals De Gaulle and Petain, and how these decisions affected the lives of thousands of French and foreign Jews during the years 1940-1945. It answers other questions like: Why was Paris spared from complete destruction after Hitler ordered it? Why were the top French war criminals absolved from prosecution? What motivated French politicians and the French people before and during the war to take sides with or against Germany? The book is a story of how courage, hope and humor can triumph over evil when a family's survival is at stake.