Historical novel details Nazi resistance

Published 7:00 am Tuesday, July 22, 2025

‘Sisters of the Night and Fog’ is based on a true story

It is 1940 and the world is either at war or soon will be. The Nazis are occupying Paris. “Sisters of the Night and Fog,” by Erika Robuck, is based on the true story of an American woman and an English woman who are living in France, and how they eventually become partners and friends, fighting with the French Resistance.

Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who is married to a Frenchman, decides to stay in France instead of returning to America, despite the rumblings of war and the impending invasion of France by the Nazis.

Violette Bushell is newly widowed with a small child. Neither knows exactly what she wants to do to fight Naziism, but each knows she must do something.

The years of the occupation are hard ones for Parisiennes. Food is rationed. The Nazis set a curfew for when people must be off the streets or risk arrest. Bombings are a regular occurrence, and rubble is everywhere.

Virginia and her husband, Philippe, have seen the Nazi atrocities up close and personal when they witness someone being beaten, for no other reason than that he is Jewish. Following her miscarriage, Philippe and Virginia are closer than ever and decide that surviving isn’t enough — they need to do more.

Their choice is to become part of the French Resistance and act as couriers for American and British fighter pilots, offering them food and shelter, while guiding them across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain and safety. The work is fraught with danger — being caught means certain arrest, possibly deportation to a concentration camp or being shot by a firing squad.

Violette, after the death of her husband, feels adrift. She’s not sure what she wants or needs to do, but she knows she has to do something. Ultimately, she is contacted by the British secret war organization, the Special Operations Executive, and learns how to parachute, use a weapon and blend in with the enemy. Her mission is to get intelligence from the French resistors back to the SOE, and carry valuable documents and large sums of cash to help the resistance.

The information is exceptionally valuable to the Allies to pinpoint Nazi movements, locations of missiles and other information to plan and implement one of the defining moments in the war: D-Day.

But Violette and Virginia are captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp. They and their fellow female prisoners endure starvation, beatings by the Nazi guards, rape and disease. They sleep in flea-infested bunks, with little more than rags for clothes. They are subjected to the most severe work imaginable and forced to watch their fellow prisoners shot if they try to escape or become too weak to work.

They patiently wait for the liberation that they know is coming, but it can’t come soon enough. Virginia and Violette are eventually sent to another camp, Furstenberg, where conditions are worse than at Ravensbrück. As history tells us, the Allies eventually liberated the camps, but not before thousands and hundreds of thousands of prisoners died.

“Sisters of the Night and Fog” is well-researched and graphic in its description of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war. The characters are well-developed and their story is believable. Although hard to read in parts, the language and descriptions are needed for the story and to contribute to the believability of the situation.

The book ultimately is the story of the indomitable courage and spirit of the human body and mind, even under the worst of circumstances. As the author points out: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13, New International Version.