Searching for Maurice Pertschuk, British Secret agent in the French Resistance
One moonless night in 1942, a handsome 20-year-old British SOE lieutenant, Maurice Pertschuk, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur with orders to report to the French resistance. Three years later he’d be hanged at Buchenwald, just 13 days before its liberation, within earshot of approaching Allied guns. Friends rescued the sheaf of poems he’d scribbled on scavenged paper and published them in 1946 as “Leaves of Buchenwald.”
What had happened, his young niece wondered, to this young poet? A seemingly impenetrable silence hung around the subject.
Only after her mother’s death did this niece dare look for answers. In The Moon in Splinters she revisits Maurice’s haunts, tracks down survivors and interviews their families. A portrait emerges of a slight, brilliant, romantic intellectual; of gentle disposition, yet tough, full of “imaginative audacity,” who organized a vast, yet to date largely forgotten, resistance network in southern France.
After the Germans occupied the whole of France, London ordered his team to blow up a Toulouse explosive factory, but a double agent caught wind of the plot. Maurice and 16 others were betrayed, arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald.
The Moon in Splinters follows twists and turns in the discoveries, the disappointments and the revelations - all interwoven with Maurice’s reconstructed story. It leads to a surprise ending, even more sinister than the one historians tell.
ISBN: 978-1 916556-74-4 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-917837-06-4 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-917837-07-1 (epub)
“Anne Whiteside has dug deeper into the mystery of a wartime betrayal that has eluded historians of occupied France since the end of World War II. Her loyalty to the victim of that betrayal, who happened to be an uncle she never met, is as affecting as her fascinating book is informative. The Moon in Splinters is a double book: her thorough investigation into what happened and the biography of a brave Resistance fighter.”
Charles Glass,
author of Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation and
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France
“With a poet’s grace and a detective’s tenacity, Anne Whiteside weaves a thrilling historical mystery into a deeply personal quest to understand a painful past. The result is a gem of a book—timeless, urgent, and unforgettable.”
Sarah Ladipo Manyika
author of Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, and Between Starshine and Clay
Searching for Maurice Pertschuk, British Secret agent in the French Resistance
One moonless night in 1942, a handsome 20-year-old British SOE lieutenant, Maurice Pertschuk, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur with orders to report to the French resistance. Three years later he’d be hanged at Buchenwald, just 13 days before its liberation, within earshot of approaching Allied guns. Friends rescued the sheaf of poems he’d scribbled on scavenged paper and published them in 1946 as “Leaves of Buchenwald.”
What had happened, his young niece wondered, to this young poet? A seemingly impenetrable silence hung around the subject.
Only after her mother’s death did this niece dare look for answers. In The Moon in Splinters she revisits Maurice’s haunts, tracks down survivors and interviews their families. A portrait emerges of a slight, brilliant, romantic intellectual; of gentle disposition, yet tough, full of “imaginative audacity,” who organized a vast, yet to date largely forgotten, resistance network in southern France.
After the Germans occupied the whole of France, London ordered his team to blow up a Toulouse explosive factory, but a double agent caught wind of the plot. Maurice and 16 others were betrayed, arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald.
The Moon in Splinters follows twists and turns in the discoveries, the disappointments and the revelations - all interwoven with Maurice’s reconstructed story. It leads to a surprise ending, even more sinister than the one historians tell.
ISBN: 978-1 916556-74-4 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-917837-06-4 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-917837-07-1 (epub)
“Anne Whiteside has dug deeper into the mystery of a wartime betrayal that has eluded historians of occupied France since the end of World War II. Her loyalty to the victim of that betrayal, who happened to be an uncle she never met, is as affecting as her fascinating book is informative. The Moon in Splinters is a double book: her thorough investigation into what happened and the biography of a brave Resistance fighter.”
Charles Glass,
author of Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation and
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France
“With a poet’s grace and a detective’s tenacity, Anne Whiteside weaves a thrilling historical mystery into a deeply personal quest to understand a painful past. The result is a gem of a book—timeless, urgent, and unforgettable.”
Sarah Ladipo Manyika
author of Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, and Between Starshine and Clay
