A quarter million. That is the number of European Jews saved from Nazi death camps during World War II by a heroic and magnificently successful sub-part of the Resistance movement in France—the Resistance’s vast and complex network of refugee escape lines. Initially created to rescue Allied soldiers separated from their units and escaped prisoners of war, the lines, once established, were there for all victims and resisters of Nazi viciousness–political refugees, compromised spies, and as the need grew ever more urgent, 330,000 Jews trapped in France after the Nazis invaded. Of those 330,000, France’s escape lines saved over 250,000—more than triple the number caught, deported and murdered.
One of the first lines, a daring and successful, but short-lived line that was run, improbably, by two women in Paris, is the subject of a gripping new book, Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story Of Courage, Friendship, And Betrayal. Paris Undercover’s author, Matthew Goodman, will be the featured author at the Jewish Book Festival’s 2025 Kristallnacht Memorial Event in partnership with the University of La Verne on Sunday, November 9. Goodman is the author of four earlier non-fiction books, including the 2013 bestseller Eighty Days and the 2019 New York City Book Award winner The City Game. On November 9 he will discuss Paris Undercover, its remarkable backstory, the events it relates, their impacts and their implications for today.
Paris Undercover’s unlikely heroes, Kate Bonnefous and Etta Shiber, were cultured, middle-aged expatriates—Kate, English; Etta, American–enjoying a genteel retirement in the City of Light when, in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, starting World War II. When the Nazi army marched into the low countries and northern France in 1940, then into Paris itself in June 1940, Kate and Etta came out of retirement and entered the vanguard of the escape line movement.
First, using identification documents Kate had obtained as a volunteer for the French Red Cross, they gained access to German military hospitals housing wounded Allied prisoners-of-war. They then audaciously smuggled two British prisoners, in two separate trips, out of a hospital in northern France, into the trunk of Kate’s Peugeot, then in two harrowing trips south through Nazi checkpoints, to their apartment in Paris. Kate then obtained money, train tickets, and forged identification for both men, and arranged for a guide who carried them safely across the demarcation line separating occupied from unoccupied France. Next, building on contacts made and experience gained in the first two rescues, Kate created an ongoing, rigorously planned, effective escape line. Between August and mid-November 1940, that line rescued a documented total of twenty British soldiers, plus some fifteen French escapees.
Then the line closed. In November 1940, the Gestapo arrested Kate and Etta, and later tried and convicted them of aiding unauthorized crossings of the demarcation line and of aiding the enemy–an offense potentially punishable by death. Kate was sentenced to death; Etta, to three years’ imprisonment. Then the two friends were separated and lost all track of each other until the war’s end.
Etta did not serve her full sentence. In May 1942, she was sent home to America in a prisoner swap. Shortly after, she published a memoir of her ordeal, Paris-Underground. It was then that Kate and Etta’s story of courage and friendship became, as well, a story of betrayal.
Ghostwritten by a professional writer, Paris-Underground quickly became a bestseller, remained a bestseller for almost four months, was made into a Hollywood film, and served as an immensely successful piece of wartime propaganda, intensifying anti-Nazi feelings in America and bolstering support for the war effort. But Paris Undercover reveals something that Paris-Underground’s readers never knew—while publicized as a true, unvarnished memoir, it was, in significant details, skillfully crafted fiction.
Paris Undercover corrects the inaccuracies in Paris Underground and reveals Kate’s fate after 1941, including chilling details of how Paris-Underground’s publication impacted her. Her death sentence was never executed; she survived. But for four years, she endured slave labor, starvation, solitary confinement, random beatings and interrogation under torture–sufferings typical of the sufferings of hundreds of the Nazis’ political prisoners. In the course of telling Kate’s story, Goodman adds several up-to-now little known details of those sufferings to the historical record and to present-day understanding of the extent of Nazi inhumanity.
Kate’s ordeal ended in February 1945 after the German army, fleeing the victorious Soviet army, abandoned Kate’s last place of imprisonment, a converted medieval castle in Silesia (now in southwest Poland). One morning she simply walked out of the abandoned prison, made her way to the nearest town, from there to Odessa, Ukraine on the Black Sea, then to Marseilles, and at last, home. She reached liberated Paris on April 11, 1945.
For her heroic rescues, Kate was awarded the Order of the British Empire and France’s Croix de Guerre with silver star. More importantly, she herself felt deep pride in what she accomplished, and she enjoyed, for the rest of her life, close friendships with several of the soldiers she rescued.
Kate did not reconnect with Etta. In summer 1945, Etta learned that Kate had survived the war, and wrote Kate a long letter expressing her joy. But Kate never answered. A few months before, Kate had received a copy of Paris-Underground and read it. The facts it made public while Kate remained at the Gestapo’s mercy amounted, as she instantly recognized, to an unforgivable betrayal. The interwoven fictions aggravated the betrayal a hundredfold.
Matthew Goodman considers the story of Kate and Etta’s escape line an illustration of how citizens can resist when their governments fail them. He relates that when he began researching the nascent French Resistance, in which Kate and Etta’s line played a pioneering role, he was struck by the question of how individuals react in the face of growing authoritarianism, xenophobia and injustice. The story behind the publication of Paris-Underground invokes a separate moral calculus, Goodman says. While Kate was obviously betrayed by the book’s publication, Etta had every reason to believe Kate had been executed as sentenced and was beyond harm. Moreover, the book furthered the cause Etta and Kate had risked their lives for, as it helped America understand the nobility of the anti-Nazi cause and in this way helped the war effort. Says Goodman, “It’s a complicated affair.”
At the Kristallnacht Memorial Event, Goodman will relate how he discovered Kate and Etta’s story; how he was initially drawn to retell and update it; how the plot thickened as he uncovered, one by one, the deceptions in the story’s first public telling and their impact; how the moral issues that swirled around Kate, Etta and their contemporaries resonate today; and how, in this eighty-seventh year since Kristallnacht, Kate and Etta’s story may shed light on how ordinary citizens can rightly address those same issues.
Matthew Goodman will be presenting Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story of Courage, Friendship and Betrayal at the University of La Verne on Sunday, November 9 at 4:00 p.m. as the Jewish Book Festival’s Kristallnacht Memorial Event. For more information or to register, please visit www.jewishsgpv.org/jbf or call the Jewish Federation office at (626) 445-0810.
Tyna Orren is a Jewish Book Festival of the Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys committee member.
