Mistress of the Ritz

 by Melanie Benjamin

I picked this book up on a whim at Chapters.  I expected it to be a light read about WWII.  Boy was I wrong,,and pleasantly surprised.

The book is based on the life of a real couple, the Manager of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and his American, Jewiish wife, Claude and Blanche Auzello.

The story takes place in Paris when the Nazis have orverrun the city and taken over the Ritz for their headquarters.  The two people are disgusted to have to be nice to the Nazis.

The couple have quite a fiery relationship.  The wife is especially upset when her husband insists that he has to have a mistress because it is what French husbands do.  The wife is upset at how her husband cowtows to the Germans.  She does not know that he is working with the resistance, feeding information  to the resistance, hiding away supplies for the resistance.  

Blanche meets a kind of wild woman, a gypsy, on a boat when she is returning to Paris after leaving her husband for a time.  The two become fast friends and the girl, Lily, convinces Blanche to help her with her work for the resistance.  While Blanche's husband thinks she is off drinking and partying she is actually on missions to help downed soldiers, etc.  It is ironic that neither of them know what the other is doing until late in the book.

One day Blanche makes a mistake, she throws a drink at a Nazi while she is at a famous restaurant with Lily.  She is arrested and tortured.  The Germans know what Lily is and want her to turn Lily in.  Both of them end up in a prison.  While she is in prison Blanche keeps telling them she is a Jew to take attention off Lily but the Germans won't believe her. Blanche assumes Lily dies there.  When the Americans enter Paris the prison doors are opened and Blanche is able to make it back to the hotel.  Her husband is shocked at how much she has changed.  After the war Blanche is plagued by nightmares of her torture and what she experienced in the prison.  Finally one night Claude shoots her and then himself.  At the end of the book we find out that Lily did survive and kept awared of Blanche and Claude but she never got in contact.  Perhaps if she had Blanche would have been able to recover a bit.  She felt guilty for thinking she was responsbible for Lily's death.

This turned out to be a very interesting book with very powerful characters.