This Past Traversed with Extreme Enthusiasm

This will hopefully soon be the home of the first podcast series dedicated to the improbable, unbiddable phenomenon known as the Resistance in WWII.

While primarily concerned with the French Resistance (due to a bias in your intrepid host's personal library), we will also hopefully discuss Jewish Resistance (such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the partisans of Vilna), German Resistance (White Rose, etc...), the rescue in Denmark, and others.

Until then, I can't think of a better way to end this post and begin our adventure than with the words of Daniel Cordier:

"This past, still so alive for me, seems to me like the improvisation of a jazz band whose instruments have been lost and much of their recordings destroyed. This past traversed with extreme enthusiasm, with devotion without calculation, resembles a concert played only once, and which specialists endeavor to reconstruct with bits of documents or testimonies.

At the end of their investigation perhaps they will discover... the composition of the orchestra or the kind of music played. But whatever their patience, whatever the exactitude of their research, no one can ever again perceive in this music the particular sensitivity of the musicians and their instruments, nor the richness of its melody or the complexity of its harmony, such as it was on the day it was performed.

Only those who assisted with it will preserve in their minds the plenitude of improvisations in this concert, without being able, because of their deformed memories and impotent vocabulary, to share their pleasure, fixed forever in their solitary memory."

Vive la Resistance.

Sources: L'inconnu du Panthéon, Vol 1. pg 303.