Steve Watkins takes on the tough topic of the Holocaust in his book Stolen by Night. Inventing characters like Nicolette and Jules but staying true to the history of occupied Paris during World War II, Watkins tells his horror tale from the perspective of the French Resistance.
Nicolette and Jules are two fourteen year old youth who love bicycling and hope to race someday as their fathers did. To live out her dream, Nicolette cuts her hair and plans to enter the upcoming thirty kilometer race disguised as a boy wearing her papa’s racing jersey. Watkins includes various scenes of Rollfast and Favor bicycles and includes talk of derailleurs for bicyclist enthusiasts. In these moments, the two teens feel alive, “both on bikes, pedaling furiously through the streets of Paris, their faces bright pink from the rushing wind, the roads opening up before them as they ride into the open countryside, away from the Nazis, away from the occupation, away from all this grief and loss and pain” (121).
Instead, Jules’ father languishes in a prisoner of war camp and Nicolette’s works for Paris’ Police Nationale. Her papa believes the Nazis are reasonable people who know how to run an efficient government “defined by order and prosperity” (64). Nicolette’s eighteen-year-old sister vehemently disagrees and refuses to remain silent in the face of such hatred and bigotry. She sneaks out at night to join her boyfriend, Antoine, and other Paris youth who have formed resistance groups to keep the flame of the French resistance alive.
Soon Jules and Nicolette throw themselves fully into the nocturnal and clandestine work of creating and posting flyers, defacing German signs, and otherwise disrupting the new order under German occupation. Working under the code name Les Parents, the pair feels invincible. Sleep-deprived, they grow distant from their families as they live their secret lives “fighting the good fight and [letting themselves] think [they] are triumphant with [their] small acts of vandalism” (113).
That all changes when Nicolette is caught and taken to Natzweiler, a work camp called Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) located near the Vosges Mountains. This is a world of rationing, deprivation, starvation, brutality, and the senseless taking of lives.
Amidst this excruciating horror, Nicolette must survive, but survival is its own form of torture. Nevertheless, she vows to remember those whose lives are taken, to memorialize those robbed of dignity, those subjected to brutality. From her, readers learn that we all need a purpose, “perhaps that is what keeps us alive” (263). As Nicolette bears witness to Hitler’s atrocities, she also miraculously maintains the brand of bravery and hope that can emerge in the darkest times. She vows to live so that she can tell the world the truth.
- Donna