On a weekday morning in February, 1947, as Grace Healey is rushing to her job, an accident in front of Grand Central Station that killed a woman pedestrian has brought all movement to a standstill. Forced to detour through the station, Grace notices a lone suitcase underneath a bench. Grace looks around for the owner of the unattended case,…
On a weekday morning in February, 1947, as Grace Healey is rushing to her job, an accident in front of Grand Central Station that killed a woman pedestrian has brought all movement to a standstill. Forced to detour through the station, Grace notices a lone suitcase underneath a bench.
Grace looks around for the owner of the unattended case, but can find no one searching for it. So she sits down, places it on the bench and opens it. Inside, she can find no identification of its owner, but she spots a bundle of photos of young women, carefully wrapped in lace. For reasons she cannot explain even to herself, she removes the photos, returns the case to where she found it and leaves.
This linear opening of Pam Jenoff’s “The Lost Girls of Paris” (Park Row Books, 368 pp., $ 16.99 paperback) soon leads to a complex search for the identities of the young women in the photos and for the owner of the suitcase. Some inquiries will be fruitless, some will yield bits of information, but Jenoff’s compelling telling of the search quickly reels in the reader.
In the process, Jenoff’s chapters toggle between Grace, a recent widow who is hiding out in Manhattan to escape her well-meaning, overly-solicitous family, and the critical but unacknowledged roles the young women played in the weeks leading to the successful invasion of France by Allied forces.
This much documented history is known: The young women, some barely 18, were secret operatives recruited and trained by the British to aid the Resistance. Once deployed out of London, they worked in occupied Europe – mostly in and around Paris – entirely beneath the radar. Because they were never formally commissioned, they had no official status either with the British government or the military when they went missing.
The absence of official status for these 50 female agents in enemy territory resulted in no public recognition of their deeds nor hero status conferred on them after the war. The casualty rate among this group was high. Fifteen died while engaged in active service, and 13 were executed in concentration camps.
Jenoff imagines the group being conceived by Eleanor Trigg, a fictitious Special Operations Executive (SOE) secretary, after the division’s director laments the continual captures of male soldiers assigned to radio transmission and courier service in Europe. She convinces him women could more effectively do the covert work without appearing suspicious, and undertakes their recruitment, training and deployment.
(In fact, the enterprise was established and run by an SOE employee whose background was similar to the one Jenoff creates for Trigg.)
When, after a highly successful launch, the girls begin disappearing, Trigg becomes concerned that some of the transmission equipment has been compromised. But the director who agreed to her visionary plan dismisses Trigg’ alarm and insists, to her dismay, that the girls continue to transmit.
Trigg knows someone sold out her girls. But who?
In the course of illuminating a little-known aspect of Allied operations, Jenoff also conjures two engaging romances, one threatened by the perils of war, the other by uncertainty and reluctance.
Fran Wood, retired op-ed columnist and former books editor for The Star-Ledger, blogs at nj.com.