Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do during the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story they were telling us.

Norway was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, and I've met a lot of people who had to live through that occupation in varying degrees.

I studied history at university, so I'm always quite fascinated by the Second World War and France. That's one of my interests.

Every show you do, you have to do research, and I love to dig into things. I learned about World War II by doing 'Anne Frank.'

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.

I've always had a keen interest in the world. My father was in Patton's 3rd Army, and he helped liberate Dachau in the 7th Army.

The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier.

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose.

The reason that 75% of the Jews in France survived is that the French people helped us.

The men who died at D-Day did not die shoulder-to-shoulder with their French comrades. They died to liberate the French from a sinister and brutal occupation.

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.

One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.

Hungary has a moral debt to the Jews that it helped send to death camps thirty years after the First World War.

Without the railways, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. I don't actually think the second world war would have happened without them.

When the Second World War started, I was only five but I still remember... Being a witness... I wanted people to remember what happened in our country and elsewhere.

In France, at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres... If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees.

Think of the prelude to World War Two. Think of all the countries that said, well, we don’t have enough evidence. I mean, Mein Kampf had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to do. The people who argued for waiting for more evidence have to ask themselves how they are going to feel at that point where another event occurs.

The communists are our allies in this war. That's the Nazis we are fighting. Go look at them.

The French are simply not reliable partners in a world where the good people in it ought to be working together. The French managed to lose the 2nd World War in 20 minutes. Along with the British, we got into the war and had about 150,000 guys killed getting their country back for them.

Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, commanders and political instructors, men and women guerrillas! The whole world is looking to you as a force capable of destroying the brigand hordes of German invaders. The enslaved peoples of Europe under the yoke of the German invaders are looking to you as their liberators. A great mission of liberation has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission! The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war.

The people Hitler never understood, and whose actions, continued to exasperate him to the end of his life, were the British.

I question the Americanism of Henry Ford for accepting a citation [medal] from the biggest gangster in the world…. Doesn’t he realize that the German newspapers, reporting the citation, said all Americans were behind Nazism? Whose side is Mr. Ford on?