French author of war memoirs

Mireille Marokvia, 99, a French author of two critically acclaimed memoirs that describe her experiences in wartime Europe, died Oct. 19 in Las Cruces, N.M., where she had lived for 30 years.

In her memoirs -- “Immortelles: Memoir of a Will o’ the Wisp” (1996) and “Sins of the Innocent” (2006) -- Marokvia described her childhood in a French village and her wartime ordeals in Nazi Germany.

The daughter of a teacher, Mireille Journet grew up in Manou, a village near Chartres. She studied French literature and philology at the Sorbonne. In 1939, she married Artur Marokvia, a German painter.

Although he was opposed to the Nazi movement, he spent the war years serving as an illustrator for the armed forces, the New York Times reported in its obituary. While her husband was in the service, she lived in Germany and, on occasion, helped Polish prisoners of war to the Swiss border.

After the war she and her husband immigrated to the United States, where he did magazine illustrations and she worked as an assistant designer for a theatrical costumer. She also wrote a series of children’s books that had French animals as their main characters. The books were illustrated by her husband.

After his death in 1986, she turned her attention to her memoirs, a project her husband had discouraged because they brought up bad memories of the war, the New York Times obituary noted.