In the worst moments of World War II, hiding was the only hope for German Jews, lost Allied soldiers at the front, or anyone else who needed to escape the Nazi regime.
Brussels was one of the cities in which the resistance groups best worked those evasion networks that managed to save many lives. The idea of the Comète network proliferated in many spaces in old Europe, even in the Basque Country. Until its last blows in the summer of 1944, when the German occupation of France was defeated.
In that summer of 1944 we meet the young Belgian Monique de Bissy, a member of the anti-Nazi resistance. His life was about to die out in the interim of the getaway. But he was finally able to recover his health and wait for a place of shelter to hide, which soon materialized thanks to Martín Inchauspe.
From that act of salvation, a love between Monique and Martín ends up bearing fruit. Only in those strange times of war, fear and necessity, each one made a living as best he could, in that balance (sometimes unsustainable) between ethics and necessity.
Because Martín has managed to maintain his comfortable economic position thanks to smuggling, negotiating with any bidder willing to appraise previously plundered works of art.
In principle, this negotiation in the middle of an aberrant conflict seems to be quite a departure from Monique's vital role, dedicated to the cause of the liberation of Europe from the spectral ideal of Nazism.
Monique knows of dehumanized practices that, even at war, would shake the foundations of a complete civilization like the human one, convinced of its morality and its ability to find peace.
Between Martín and Monique a relationship is established as strange as the war scene that surrounds them. Love as an essence capable of bringing out the best, of delivering human miseries to creative passion, but also reason, ambition or selfishness as a ballast capable of throwing everything away.
A novel about resistance, principles and humanity. But also a plot about power, conspiracy, human vileness and destruction.
You can now buy the novel All your names, the book by Fernando García Pañeda, here. With a small discount for accesses from this blog, which is always appreciated: