Némirovsky’s love letter to the France that spurned her and killed her

By 1940 Irène Némirovsky, who had arrived in France at the age of 16 as a refugee from Kiev, had become a prominent and successful novelist. In March of that year she celebrated what was to be her final publication day. She was Jewish, and for French publishers under Nazi occupation she had ceased to exist as an author when the German army entered Paris. But she continued to write. She moved with her children to a village in Burgundy, hoping to protect her family from the Vichy government’s manhunt, and she started work on her masterpiece, Suite Française, which would lie undiscovered until 2004.

She also started three other novels, two of which she finished. Both were published in France after the war. By then their author was dead. Némirovsky had been arrested by two local gendarmes on 15 July 1942 and sent to the nearby holding camp at Pithiviers.