Children of Pithiviers

"In the summer of 1942 more than two thousand Jewish children were torn from their parents and kept behind barbed wire in a concentration camp in Pithiviers, a small town in the Loiret. Without adult supervision, the little children roamed through the camp, many of them so confused they forgot their own names. In the center of town and in full view of the towns-people, they were guarded by Frenchmen, who had robbed their parents and then packed them into cattle cars. Eventually, the Germans, who had only taken adults over sixteen, were persuaded by the French government to take these children as well, and they, too, were shipped to their deaths in the gas chambers." "Two escaped. A pair of young sisters from a cultured household in Paris found refuge at the home of the local aristocracy, a childless couple known to all as Madame and Monsieur.". "Having survived the occupation and the lean years after the war, the couple has been reduced to taking in lodgers. In the summer of 1959, a beautiful young Sorbonne student takes up residence with them, and falls first under the sway of Madame, and then of Monsieur. During the course of the summer, eighteen-year-old Deidre discovers the diary kept by the two Jewish girls and left in the attic of their old millhouse long ago. In so doing, she not only learns their fate, but reawakens old suspicions, and old appetites, on the estate."--BOOK JACKET.