Introduction

Every autumn, I invite students from my class on resistance and collaboration in the Second World War to suggest primary sources for analysis in seminars. This request has introduced them to various items of material culture from soldiers in the United States or British armies, a memoir from a Polish officer of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), newspapers and Jewish ID cards from the Channel Islands, and a Flemish deed of property that prohibited Jews from being potential owners in 1944. We have held a beloved shard of glass kept from London&s;s blitz and have used a photograph of a Yugoslav teenager to identify the location of the Italian camp for displaced people where he was held at the end of the war. In 2024, as I was writing this book, Jenna Mornas brought a collection of familial letters written in Paris from 1940 to 1942. Within this treasured correspondence, the last two letters were especially significant because of the time and place in which they were written: Drancy, 23 July 1942. The moving words in these letters, alongside the experiences of the people who wrote, received, circulated, and preserved them, encapsulate this book&s;s approach to writing a history of antifascist defiance through the last letters written between 1939 and 1944.