In the Shadows of Paris:
The Nazi Concentration Camp That Dimmed the City of Light
Anne Sinclair
National Jewish Book Award Finalist 2021
Translated from the French by Sandra Smith.
“In her deeply affecting memoir, Sinclair brilliantly captures what her grandfather endured at Royallieu-Compiègne….[and] reminds us of how little time is left to gather every one of these sacred stories.”
—Jewish Book Council, in recognition as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
“A poignant memoir and a historically relevant document. Sinclair writes with honesty and eloquence….and will be well received by many.”
—Nashville Book Review
“A haunting tale.”
—France Today
“This story has haunted me since I was a child.”
So begins Anne Sinclair in her bestselling personal account about her journey to find answers about her own life and that of her grandfather Léonce Schwartz. In the Shadows of Paris is part memoir, part historical document revealing a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust. On December 12, 1941, the Nazis carried out a mass arrest—in French the word is rafle, but there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror—of einflussreiche Juden, as the Germans put it. For that there is an equivalent: “influential Jews.”
Those doctors, professors, artists, and others at the upper levels of French society were then imprisoned less than fifty miles from Paris in the Royallieu-Compiègne concentration camp. Those who did not perish in Frontstalag 122 were deported by the infamous cattle cars to Auschwitz and other death camps, except for the few to escape that fate. Léonce Schwartz was one of them.

Anne Sinclair was born in New York City and moved to France with her family as a young girl. There she rose to fame, in part due to her family’s vast collection of paintings by Picasso, Degas, Seurat, and Renoir, which she would become heir to, but also because her beauty and social grace led to her serving as the model for statues of Marianne, the national emblem of France. From 1984 to 1997 she hosted 7 sur 7, France’s popular Sunday evening news show, similar to CBS’s 60 Minutes; during that time she interviewed many world figures, including Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, and Prince Charles. She is the author of numerous bestsellers in France
Hardcover | jacketed
5 x 7 inches | 118 pages
8-page color photograph insert
ISBN-13: 978-1-7333958-6-1
$21.95 | History / Jewish
November 2021





