Not a game for heroes

“This is not a hero’s business,” fifteen-year-old Magali's mentor tells her when she takes Magali on as an assistant to her work—the edgily semi-legal rescue of children from internment camps in 1940 in the “unoccupied zone” of Vichy France. “It’s not glamorous. It is simply very dangerous babysitting.”

Magali listens to her. She knows no-one wiser—or braver. She wants to be exactly like her.

She knows a hero when she sees one.

Magali does what she must, day after day—in crowded train-stations under the gaze of suspicious police, at the barbed-wire checkpoints of camp gates—but her rage at those who would pen up humans like cattle grows like a fire in her soul. Her need to strike out at them—quietly, cleverly, disregarding warnings even from her heroes themselves—edges her toward the brink of disaster.

Defy the Night closely follows the little-known history of Vichy France’s internment camps and of the quietly courageous aid workers—mostly young women—who rescued children from those camps, at first legally and later at the risk of their lives.