Ninette’s War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France

The moving, poignant true story of a young Jewish girl coming of age in France during World War II, as the Holocaust approaches.

This is the heart-wrenching true story of a young Jewish girl coming of age in France during World War II.

Ninette Dreyfus belonged to one of the most influential Jewish families in Paris--second only to the Rothschilds--her parents’ social circle ranging from Einstein to Colette. But all that privilege counted for nothing when the Nazis arrived; the family was high up on the list of Philippe Petain’s targets.

Inspired by diary entries and by conversations the author had with Ninette before she died, Ninette’s War narrates the family’s fall from grace alongside the creeping understanding of the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. Through Ninette’s eyes we witness how it all unfolded: from the anti-Semitism in the playground--sometimes from her own teachers--to Ninette’s first crush under a false identity.

Woven into the political backdrop of a nation turning inward on itself, this is the tale of a life once filled with riches becoming rootless, where friends were left behind and politicians legislated their own people out of existence--and to their deaths--culminating in what we now know as the Holocaust.

John Jay is a former managing editor at the London Sunday Times and the author of one previous book published in Britain, Facing Fearful Odds: My Father’s Story of Captivity, Escape and Resistance 1940-1945. Ninette’s War is his second book. John lives in England.