BOOKS

Swastika over Paris

On Georg Haddad Street in the Syrian capital Damascus lives an old man named Aloïs Brunner. He is the last major Nazi war criminal still at large. His crimes are on a par with those of Adolf Eichmann. He is responsible for the murder of 128,500 people, most of them French Jews, many of them children.

Through the parallel stories of Armand Kohn, a rich Parisian Jew who naively refused to accept the inevitable, and Paulette Szlifke, a courageous, teenage reistance fighter who was ultimately betrayed for her Jewishness, the reader learns how the Nazis - aided by many French men and women, some enthusiastically, some unwittingly - attempted genocide.