Category:

Once Admiral Leahy had departed, the rest of the passengers began streaming down the gangway; they had on their best clothing, the men in suits and ties with overcoats draped over their elbows, many of the women wearing white gloves, nearly everyone, including the children, in hats. Most of the children clutched dolls or stuffed animals. The pier was now alive with a hubbub of languages, of shouts and cries and tearful embraces, as port officials and workers from the Travelers Aid Society helped to translate instructions and locate suitcases and direct passengers to the correct entry points while Red Cross volunteers hurried about offering cups of milk to the children. Several of the more important-looking men were immediately surrounded by reporters with little notepads; diplomats discussed the morale of the people in the occupied territories; refugee workers warned of the worsening famine in Greece and the fate of the French naval fleet in unoccupied France.

Etta knew little about any of that ("What could I have told them," she would ask in a newspaper article the following year, "after being shut away from the world for so long?"), and she was surprised to be approached by a reporter from the Daily News, who wanted to know about the Nazi military tribunal that had sentenced her. "I shall never forget the judge's eyes," she told him. "They were blue and as hard and cold as frozen steel. I shall never forget the cruel, calculating voice of the prosecutor as he demanded the death penalty. I was stunned, yet not afraid. I thought, Well, I hope they get it over with quickly. I've lived 63 years already. I guess that's enough. " The reporter couldn't help but note that despite her ordeal she told the story well and easily, while steadfastly denying her own importance in it. Her voice was cultured, the vowels long and perfectly formed and without any trace of a New York accent, the diction old-fashioned, in the style of Mrs. Roosevelt.

On the pier Etta was met by her nephew John Kahn, who drove her to the hotel in which she would spend the night. The next day she was scheduled to board a train from Grand Central Terminal bound for Syracuse, where she was to stay with her brother and his wife while she recuperated. Before leaving the city she would unexpectedly find a photo of herself on the front page of the Daily News, looking happy but exhausted, waving at the camera in the lobby of her hotel with a large American flag in the background.

Among those who saw the newspaper story was a Hungarian émigré named Aladar Farkas, who had arrived in New York one year earlier under the auspices of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization working to relocate journalists trapped in occupied Europe. Farkas hoped to use Etta's wartime experiences as the basis for a novel; however, Farkas's agent, Paul Winkler, decided that the book would be more successful as a memoir, and that it should be put together by the literary syndicate he had founded, Press Alliance, Inc. After several months of interviews with Etta, the result was a manuscript that would be published under the title Paris-Underground.

Credited to "Etta Shiber, in collaboration with Anne and Paul Dupre" (Paul and Anne Dupre were the pen names of Paul Winkler and his wife, Betty), the book would bring Etta a kind of fame that she could never have imagined possible for someone as resolutely ordinary as herself. Published by the prestigious New York house Charles Scribner's Sons, Paris-Underground would sell more than half a million copies, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for eighteen weeks. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and appeared in condensed form in Reader's Digest; an illustrated newspaper strip based on it was serialized in papers around the country. Its publication was met with universally rapturous reviews, including one on the front page of The New York Times Book Review that called the book "poignant," "remarkable," and "moving and wonderful." A half-hour radio drama adapted from Paris-Underground was presented on the NBC program Words at War, with Etta herself appearing at the end of the show to address listeners directly. The film option was sold for $100,000, equivalent to more than $1.5 million in today's currency—as much as had ever been paid for a nonfiction book. The movie, released under the same title, would appear two years later; perhaps not surprisingly, the screenwriters added a love interest and a good deal of Parisian glamour. Reviewing the film in The Nation, James Agee noted that it provided "enough handsome young men, in various postures of gallant gratitude, to satisfy Mae West in her prime."

As it turns out, though, the film was not the only version of Paris-Underground that took liberty with the historical facts; so did the book itself. Other than Etta Shiber, all of the book's central characters were given pseudonyms, and an author's note explained that a few details had been recast or omitted, so that the German authorities could not make use of the book against anyone described in it. Still, Paris-Underground was presented unambiguously as a work of nonfiction: The first sentence of the author's note reads, "The basic facts in this book are a matter of record." The renowned author and educator Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a member of the committee that selected Paris-Underground for the Book-of-the-Month Club, observed: "It is not only literally, factually true, it sounds true. The author just sets down what happened, with a singularly honest absence of any effort to dramatize the facts or to make herself out a heroine."

This was the accepted account of Paris-Underground for the better part of a century. It is not, however, the actual account as it is to be found in French, British, and American archives; in contemporaneous newspaper reportage; and perhaps most revealingly, in Etta Shiber's own letters to her brother and sister-in-law back home in the months leading up to and immediately following the German occupation of Paris. While the work that Kate Bonnefous and Etta Shiber did in support of the Allied war effort was very real, unquestionably heroic, and transformative for both of them, the full picture turns out to be more complex than the one presented by Shiber's ghostwriters: Several of the book's most important scenes never happened in the way they were depicted, and these changes, it seems clear, were made not for security reasons but for narrative ones. Certain other distortions are the result of omission, silences that come to haunt the story. Bonnefous and Shiber, for instance, conducted their operations in Paris while it was under Nazi occupation, amid rising anti-Semitic attacks and governmental decrees designed to isolate Jews and remove them from all aspects of civic life—and yet, remarkably enough, Paris-Underground withholds the fact that Etta Shiber herself was Jewish.