The Normandy Diary of Marie-Louise Osmont: 1940-1944 - Hardcover

Osmont, Marie Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679434380 ISBN 13: 9780679434382

Publisher: Random House, 1994

Synopsis

The diary of a French woman provides a perceptive, firsthand view of life in occupied France, capturing the horrors, hardships, and banality of World War II against the backdrop of everyday rural life. TV tie-in. 15,000 first printing. First serial, Destination Discovery.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

While the 50th anniversary of D-day is being commemorated in many ways, few will be as affecting as the episodic journal of Marie Osmont, an aristocratic Frenchwoman who endured four comparatively pacific years of German occupation and three hellish months of liberation. Her chronicle, the centerpiece of a TV documentary to be broadcast by the Discovery Channel in June, offers a vividly detailed account of what it was like to be a noncombatant caught near Ground Zero when Allied forces made their long-awaited assault on Hitler's Festung Europa. At the time of the invasion, the widowed Osmont was mistress of Chƒteau P‚riers, a sizable Normandy estate about three miles inland from Sword Beach, where British Tommies landed in the early dawn of June 6, 1944. Although Boche soldiers were billeted in and around her home for nearly four years, she kept only sporadic records until the beginning of 1944. In the grim aftermath of Operation Overlord, however, her diary literally comes alive. A thoroughgoing patrician imbued with the spirit of noblesse oblige, the author reveals herself in print as a very human being. Appalled by the manifest horrors of war, she grieves for cyclamens crushed under the treads of advancing armor, fine old trees lost to fortification builders, and livestock slaughtered in the artillery duels that ravaged her demesne, as well as the civilian friends who were killed, wounded, or dispossessed in the fierce fighting. Osmont also proves an acute observer of alien social mores and appreciates the cosmic irony of death and destruction being visited upon rural innocents in the midst of an achingly beautiful summer. Her annals stop abruptly in mid-August of 1944, and the text at hand offers no clue as to her immediate or eventual fate. Eloquent testimony for posterity, reminding us that military campaigns, however just, have awful costs. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author was a middle-aged French widow living in a chateau only three miles inland from the Normandy invasion beaches. Her remarkable diary records her impressions during the German occupation, the D-Day fighting and the subsequent occupation by British troops. Profoundly resentful of the uninvited military guests who made themselves at home at Chateau Periers, Osmont could not bring herself to hate the Germans and, in fact, felt maternal pity for the youngest infantrymen. Though she achieved greater rapport with the British commandos who violently replaced them after D-Day, she soon became disgusted by their rampant thievery and vandalism (they "plunder idiotically") and, when a neighbor characterized the British as their saviors, Madame replied, "But at what a price!" Her comments often touch one's emotions as she bewails the damage to her cherished chateau in the furious fighting, tenderly cares for terrified stray animals and grieves over the fresh graves of German and British soldiers she had known. Her descriptions of the bombardments, air raids and firefights are vivid and disturbing (she was struck by shrapnel on the second day of battle but carried on after treatment). A unique account of the Normandy invasion by a perceptive observer caught in the action. Illustrations.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679434380
• ISBN 13: 9780679434382
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 118