ironic, almost daily record of life in the French countryside during the Occupation and, at the end, the insurrection during the liberation of Paris. If he had stayed there, he might have been one of the 50,000 Jews deported from the city and exterminated. Alone in his house, with the habit of writing, no other work, and the obvious impossibility of publishing during the war, he made entries in his diary almost every day: noting what people said, what he saw, and what he heard on the radio and read in the press, often with comments like this: “Monsieur de Gaulle (that’s what the paper calls him) and General Catroux have been stripped of their French nationality.” So has France. (December 12, 1940) The events “after the fall of France” described above are entered in the diary as they happened. When registering as Jewish, for example, Werth says he sang out the word “Jewish” as if he were singing the Marseillaise. He also uses his gifts as a novelist to give us portraits of the peasants, shopkeepers and railroad workers in and around the village of Saint-Amour. We see what they are like and hear, in their own words, what they think of Vichy—not much, though many trust Pétain—and how it affects their lives. The diary in French is 750 pages, far too long to be assigned in classrooms, but the English edition is less than half as long. It is his most important book in English to date. Werth returned to Paris in January 1944 but could only venture out at night until just before the Liberation. He describes the activities of a Resistance cell in their apartment: British aviators hid there until they could be smuggled out of the country. Résistants on the run hid out for a few days in their apartment and then set out for a new mission. In August, he reports the exciting advance of the Allied armies toward Paris and during the last week, he reports the street-fighting he saw in Paris during the liberation of the city. The diary ends with his capture of German prisoners huddled on a tank (he pities them), and the triumphal parade of General de Gaulle down the Champs-Élysées. Commemorative events Various events were organized in 2005 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Werth's death. Books Puvis de Chavannes (Paris: Portraits d'hier, 1909; Paris: Les Éditions G.