"Sisters in Resistance," Tilar J. Mazzeo - A Review

 The lead headline in the second section of my yesterday’s politically correct local paper read: “Nips bring big money to towns.” While surely no disrespect was meant toward any Japanese Americans living in the region, I could not help but think of the reaction of woke language vigilantes had the headline appeared in right-leaning papers like the New York Post or even The Wall Street Journal. They would have called out their editors as unapologetically xenophobic. (Incidentally, the term refers to tiny bottles of liquor on which the state of Connecticut recently imposed a five-cent tax, which brought in $4.2 million in its first full year of operation – a lot of small bottles sold (and presumably consumed) for a state with a population of 3.6 million.)

 

Like P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred, I try to “spread sweetness and light” wherever I can.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Sisters in Resistance, Tilar J. Mazzeo

October 29, 2022

 

“There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire,

which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity but which

kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.”

                                                                                                 Quote from Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book

                                                                                                 Inscribed on a bench in New York’s Central Park

                                                                                                 In memory of Frances de Chollet, one of the “sisters”

 

World War II spanned four years, eight months, and seven days, from Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, to her unconditional surrender in Reims on May 7, 1945. The death count is estimated at 70 and 85 million people. World War II is, probably, the most written about event in history, with Amazon listing over 70,000 titles – more books than one person could read in a lifetime. With over 100 million service men and women, on both sides, the War produced tens of thousands of heroes and heroines, many whose stories have yet to be told, reminding one of the closing line from the 1948 movie, The Naked City: “There are eight million stories in the naked city, and this is one of them.” Ms. Mazzeo gives us one of them in this remarkable story of three women who out-witted the German war machine over a diary – Mussolini’s daughter, a German spy, and an American socialite, married to a Swiss banker.

 

The three women: Edda Mussolini Ciano (1910-1995), “…the favorite daughter of Italy’s autocratic ruler…” and married to Count Galeazzo Ciano. Hilda Beetz (1919-2010), “…had double-crossed the Nazis when she helped Edda flee with the majority of the actual diaries”; and Frances de Chollet (1900-1999) “…drawn into the world of espionage run by Allen Dulles…” They had little in common until they colluded, unknowingly, in a dangerous, but ultimately successful, venture to bring Ciano’s diaries and papers to the Allies in Switzerland. Ciano had served as Italy’s Foreign Minister from 1936-1943, when he became disillusioned with his father-in-law’s government. In his diaries, he had written of his dislike for several Fascist and Nazi officials, especially Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. 

 

By mid-1944, the Italian Fascist Party was beginning to collapse, Mussolini was near Lake Garda under German protection. Ciano was hated by both Italian partisans and the Nazis. Edda, whose wealth had been dissipated, saw her husband’s diaries as potential currency for her and her children. Hilda Beetz turned double agent when she fell in love with Ciano, the man she was supposed to seduce in order to retrieve the diaries. Frances de Chollet was asked by Dulles to befriend Edda who had sought refuge in Switzerland. The story told by Ms. Mazzeo is how the papers – divided, hidden, and retrieved – were finally given to the Allies to be used at Nuremburg. 

 

There are others who make appearances in the story, among them – Virginia Agnelli (1899-1945) and her daughter Susanna (1922-2009), friends of Edda, and Emilio Pucci (1914-1992), an Italian nobleman, lover of Edda, who was tortured by the Nazis.

 

“After the war…,” Ms. Mazzeo writes, “these women’s stories faded into the background. But in the lived moment of what surely measures as one of the Second World War’s greatest rescue missions, they were the key actors…” Three courageous women risked their lives for the sake of a better world. This is Ms. Mazzeo’s book – a World War II story of civilian heroism – a book worth reading.