More than , documents, formerly available only to select scholars and officials, became open to the public after 76 years of secrecy. Reports soon surfaced of people leaving the archives in tears, distraught with the newfound counternarrative to what their parents and grandparents had told them about the war.
With this documentation, memories, on both an individual and collective level, could be confirmed, or confronted. For me, the opportunity was personal. My grandmother lived just outside Paris during the war, in the town of La Varenne St. And so, last summer, I traveled to France to do just this. And when I asked my grandmother to accompany me, with an infectious joy, she agreed.
La Varenne St. Her town, she stated, had been relatively untouched by the atrocities of WWII. She recalled that there were three Jewish girls in her class. She spoke to the liberation of the town with delight, describing how she tossed ripe tomatoes to the American soldiers as they descended into the valley of her town.
Her memories of the time had blanks, and justifiably so; she was only 8 when the Occupation ended. Since the liberation in August , her already-constricted memories were inundated with a national narrative of underground resistance and unity.
The story, perpetuated by both state and citizen, largely featured the heroic French Resistance fighters engaging in espionage and guerrilla warfare, and a few isolated incidents of villainous collaborators, lurking in alleyways and betraying their fellow townsmen.
