Thoughts on A LIFE IN SECRETS

Sarah Helm's A LIFE IN SECRETS reads like the backstory of an Alan Furst novel. It details the life and work of Vera Atkins, whose fame stems from her WW2 work with spies and saboteurs sent from Britain to France and her tenacious search to find information about what happened to them once they were captured. Vera's personal story makes this Furstian, and the book itself is a layered tale of puzzles across six decades.

In studying Vera, Helm's exhaustive search led her both to vindicate Vera and to reveal secrets that Vera sheltered all her life. The book delves into Vera's work during the war, her efforts to locate her agents (particularly the women), her sprawling investigation into what exactly happened to them in concentration camps. That's a whole book right there, but Helm goes further, examining Vera's family history (she was born Jewish in Romania to a German father and an Englishwoman brought up in South Africa), the secrecy in which Vera shrouded it all her life and how that affected her efforts to sanitize her own background and her work during the war.

The book is as much a celebration of the work undertaken by less than ideal agents during WW2 as it is an indictment of gross negligence and incompetence of the intelligence community, often run by less than ideal officers.

I've not given much in the way of specifics about the book, because Vera's story is told so well here that I don't want to spoil it should you decide to read it. It amazes me sometimes that the Allies won the war at all, and it is shameful that we are forgetting more and more about the war in general as time passes.

N.B. This book deals in parts with the horrors of concentration camps. It is necessary to acknowledge these horrors, but it is not easy.