Two Sisters: Betrayal, Love, and Resistance in Wartime France

Journalist Whitehouse (The People on the Beach) delivers a heartrending account of her mother-in-law’s experiences during the Holocaust. Huguette Müller and her sister, Marion, escaped the Nazis with the help of a French doctor named Frédéric Pétri in 1943. To flesh out that story beyond Huguette’s memory of it, Whitehouse tracked down the doctor’s relatives in California, conducted interviews, and combed through historical records in hopes of adding Dr. Pétri to the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. Interwoven with the details of Whitehouse’s reporting is a portrait of the white-collar Müller family, professionals who distanced themselves from their Judaism in 1920s and ’30s Berlin. When the Nazis came to power, the Müllers fled to France, where Huguette and Marion’s mother was captured and sent to Auschwitz. The sisters escaped to a ski resort in the French Alps, where Huguette broke her leg and was treated by Dr. Pétri, who took her into his home so they could avoid detection by the Gestapo at a local hospital, and eventually helped them leave France. Whitehouse nimbly balances a white-knuckle wartime narrative with a trenchant examination of the politics of Vichy France. This makes a well-covered historical period feel agonizingly immediate. Photos. (Jan.)