Anne Whiteside

Moon in Splinters

One moonless night in 1942, a handsome 20-year-old British SOE lieutenant, Maurice Pertschuk, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur with orders to report to the French resistance. Three years later he’d be hanged at Buchenwald, just 13 days before its liberation, within earshot of approaching Allied guns. Friends rescued the sheaf of poems he’d scribbled on scavenged paper and published them in 1946 as “Leaves of Buchenwald.” What had happened, his young niece wondered, to this young poet? A seemingly impenetrable silence hung around the subject. Only after her mother’s death did this niece dare look for answers. In The Moon in Splinters she revisits Maurice’s haunts, tracks down survivors and interviews their families. A portrait emerges of a slight, brilliant, romantic intellectual; of gentle disposition, yet tough, full of “imaginative audacity,” who organized a vast, yet to date largely forgotten, resistance network in southern France. After the Germans occupied the whole of France, London ordered his team to blow up a Toulouse explosive factory, but a double agent caught wind of the plot. Maurice and 16 others were betrayed, arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald. The Moon in Splinters follows twists and turns in the discoveries, the disappointments and the revelations - all interwoven with Maurice’s reconstructed story. It leads to a surprise ending, even more sinister than the one historians tell.