Photos from Occupied France

These color photos taken from the time of France's occupation by the Nazis really struck me. Not because they show things that are terribly remarkable--precisely the opposite. Photos like these transform a much-mythologized period into a reality we can relate to. History should be an empathic enterprise, where the facts of the past are turned into the malleable gold of self-recognition; but the world being what it is, all that emerges is justification, leaden as a handful of bullets.


Here's a pretty woman putting on makeup. I wonder who she was, and what happened to her?