Humanity and inhumanity in WWII

One of the most hushed-up episodes of the German occupation of France came in July 1942, when Marshal Henri Philippe Petain’s police rounded up more than 7,000 Jews, detaining them for five days without food or water in a Paris sports stadium. The Germans had specifically requested only able-bodied adults for the concentration camps, but many of these Auschwitz-bound victims were children. Pierre Laval, Petain’s diabolical right-hand man, justified it, saying it would be cruel to separate Jewish children from their families.

In her remarkable second novel, Edie Meidav revisits the French occupation and distills it into a heart-chilling tale of love and hate. Her villain is Emile Poulquet, a former Nazi collaborator and town prefect, who finds himself standing trial in Paris for signing the deportation notices of Jews 50 years earlier. Poulquet sees himself as a Laval-like patriot, “satisfying the occupiers with numbers but retaining our France,” and a humble nationalist, “not spiritually superior, not intellectually superior, not even by the dint of the richness of French culture which has lifted our nation above all others....”

The case against Poulquet falls apart when Arianne, the widow of his old Resistance nemesis, Paul, refuses to identify him in court. During a temporary release from prison, the 84-year-old escapes and makes his way back to Finier, his childhood hometown in the Pyrenees, and a final reckoning with the last woman he would have expected to save him.

Poulquet encounters unexpected opposition the day he arrives in Finier. Arianne has organized a “refugees reunion” and the cafes are packed with the Jews who survived his deportations, including the “reincarnated horror” of his former best friend, Izzy, whom he now views as “a Banal, Successful American Man.” With nowhere to hide from those he had sent to concentration camps, Poulquet takes shelter with a callow crew of young wastrels, attracted to this remote region of France where a McDonald’s recently was pillaged.

His derelict companions are fantastically realized -- to the point that it puts some strain on Meidav’s story to imagine the refined Poulquet shacking up with them in the “crawl space” of her title. Their transliterated French slang sometimes makes them sound as if they have been imported into the novel directly from the author’s native California. The sheer claustrophobic pressure of their ignorance has the effect of driving Poulquet into deeper meditations.

Poulquet has prepared his “last will and testament” to give Arianne, with whom he has been obsessed since boyhood, when he and Izzy worked as waiters at her family’s hotel. It includes, among other things, a history of his own virulent anti-Semitism, almost as deep-seated and twisted as his relations with Arianne, whom he hopes to make executor of the will. To complicate matters, Arianne’s deceased husband, Paul, turns out not to have been quite the Resistance hero she has portrayed him to be.

We learn that during the war, when Poulquet refused to hand over his deportation lists to the Resistance, Paul punished him by adding Poulquet’s Jewish mistress’ name to a list. Poulquet was unable to save Natalie from the bureaucratic machine, but even his affection for her comes drenched with lurid contempt: “Natalie was as much Salome as any Parisian whore, perhaps born with the perversity jewesses have long been known to bear, something like a primal script in Hebrew letters glowing cryptically within their very marrow, which must instruct their behavior.”

“The Sorrow and the Pity,” Marcel Ophuls’ 1971 documentary film, was the first brilliant treatment of the disparate factions that animated the French occupation: Petainistes, members of the Resistance, Nazi-sympathizers and foreign diplomats all contributed interviews to a film that followed one town’s experience. Meidav’s novel illuminates this landscape with all the brilliant Technicolor that well-honed fiction has to offer. She dexterously manages her complex pageant of vandals, shopkeepers, collaborators, survivors and the journalists who have come to cover their return, and brings the story to a worthy climax.

But the enduring success of “Crawl Space” will be the creation of Poulquet: a morbid opportunist who artfully isolates his guilt with the lie that men are mere cogs in the wheel of history. “We all have some kind of right to belong to life,” he entreats us, “even if our version of it ends up possessing a morality equivalent to that of a fishbowl: somewhat arbitrary, eminently replaceable and eternally transparent.”

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Thomas Meaney is a critic whose reviews have appeared in The Times, the Globe and Mail and the New Criterion.