In today’s Europe, far-right groups are flaunting nostalgia for the Nazi and fascist movements, and yet gaining traction at the polls. So it is bracing to read the extraordinary stories of the ordinary women and men who resisted those movements in wartime with great ingenuity, tenacity — and success.
And for many Irish readers, including this one, it will come as a welcome surprise to learn that significant numbers of our compatriots played key roles in resistance networks from Denmark to Italy. They worked as intelligence gatherers, radio communicators and saboteurs. Their backgrounds ranged from labourers and nurses to an aristocrat.
Above all, they assisted escaped or downed Allied fighters to return to war, especially along the lengthy Comet route, in which Basque smugglers brought them across the Pyrenees to departure points from nominally neutral Spain.
All wartime resistance carried a high risk of arrest, torture and execution; many in these stories paid very high prices for their commitment. Some suffered unspeakably brutal and prolonged physical and psychological abuse — this is not a book for the faint-hearted — but died without giving up any secrets. Their courage was beyond the imagination of most of us.
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The authors of this book, journalist Clodagh Finn and lawyer John Morgan, have done quite exceptional research work in ferreting out such very comprehensive accounts of these Irish resistance activists, and rightly highlight that more than half of them were women.
The history of such Irish resistors is doubly obscure, both by the nature of their work itself, and the fact that they were citizens of a non-combatant nation. This makes the wealth of telling details in these accounts all the more impressive.
Some had strong personal or political motives for supporting the Allies, where their family or personal histories gave them pro-British loyalties. But many of them were simply doing what they saw as the right and decent thing to do, to resist terror and oppression and protect, as far as they could, those in the vanguard of that struggle.
The authors deserve great credit for making their stories read like mini-thrillers, while never allowing us to lose sight of the seriousness of what was at stake, in every sense, for their protagonists
