Outwitting the Gestapo

This memoir tells how schoolteacher Aubrac, a Resistance member pregnant with her second child, carried out daring raids to free her Jewish engineer husband and others from the prisons of the ``Butcher of Lyon,'' Klaus Barbie. An excellent historical introduction on the Resistance movement by Boston's Suffolk University humanities professor Weitz, and an appropriately taut translation by Bieber, himself a survivor of Nazi terror, enhance the impact of this stirring tale of heroism, which concerns not only Resistance members, but ordinary citizens, notably women. Following the husband's rescue after nine months of torture, the family made a hair's-breadth escape to London where, four days later, their daughter was born during an air raid. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC and History Book Club selections. (May)