Less than a decade after Miranda Richmond Mouillot's Jewish grandparents wed in 1944, Anna walked out on Armand, taking their two children with her. They cut off all contact with one another and never revealed what led to their bitter divide. "The more I contemplated it, the more I felt I had no right to go on with my own life until I had learned what had happened in theirs." In 2004, after graduating from college, Mouillot moved to France to uncover the reason behind their estrangement and write A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France.
When she began, she had barely any factual information, not even the date her grandparents had married. Slowly she pieced together Anna and Armand's story using their refugee files and other sources, including a "jumble" of reminisces her grandmother had written down over the years about her wartime experiences. Eventually Richmond Mouillot delved into an area of Armand's life she had previously overlooked: his postwar years working at the Nuremberg Trials, where he was one of two Jewish interpreters. She had filed away this time in his career as a "proud accomplishment" and then forgotten about it in her quest to learn more about Anna and Armand's relationship because her grandmother hadn't been there. But it was the tragic knowledge Armand acquired at Nuremberg that ultimately broke apart his marriage.
This quietly riveting story is one of love, loss, sadness and survival. Through the lens of her grandparents' lives, Richmond Mouillot explores the legacy of tragedy, the responsibility of keeping history alive and the emotional ravages of war. --Shannon McKenna Schmidt