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Passing Misery
The Journal of a Forced Laborer in the Third Reich
Jean Louis Mary Pasquiers
Edited and translated by Rebecca L. Thompson
Foreword by Thomas Pavel
262 pages, 10 ills., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80539-935-3 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (April 2025)
eISBN 978-1-80539-936-0 eBook Not Yet Published
Description
The Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), or the Compulsory Work Service, program remains one of the most unsettling features of France’s history in World War II. Established by the Vichy government in 1943, this initiative saw young men provide forced labor, primarily within France or Germany, in support of the Third Reich’s war effort. In this illuminating translation of the journal of Jean Louis Mary Pasquiers, a former teacher and forced laborer from Paris, Passing Misery documents Pasquiers’ life within war-torn Europe, in unwilling service to the Nazi regime. By exploring Pasquiers' personal story, this book offers an unrivalled insight into the complexities of war-time collaboration, resistance, and moral culpability, shedding light on one of the darkest chapters in European history.
Jean Louis Mary Pasquiers was born in 1920 and grew up in northeastern France. He was just beginning his career as a secondary school teacher when World War II broke out. In 1943, Pasquiers was requisitioned to go work in Germany with the Service du Travail Obligatoire. After evading capture for several months, Pasquiers turned himself in at a labor office and was deported to Berlin, where he worked a clerical job for the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). Pasquiers was repatriated to France in the summer of 1945, where he took up teaching again, dedicating his educational career to facilitating French-German student exchanges. Pasquiers died in 2013 in southwestern France.
Rebecca L. Thompson is the Chair of Modern Languages at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Buffalo, New York. She holds a PhD in Literature with a focus in Translation Studies from the University of Texas and specializes in leftist and oppositional translation theories, collaboration and culpability in Vichy and Occupied France, and contemporary Francophone literature. Her recent publications include the translation, Little Wet-Paint Girl (Athabasca University Press, 2022).