When Paris fell in June 1940, almost everyone left.
Dorothy Reeder did not.
For four years, the director of the largest English-language lending library on the European continent kept it open through the Occupation, ran an underground book network to Jewish readers banned from entering, and went home to America when it was over without making a fuss. France called the library “an open window on the free world.” It never quite got around to properly thanking the woman who held it open.
At the top of Dorothy Reeder’s emergency supply list, in her own handwriting, was chocolate.
Not medical supplies. Not documents. Not cash. Chocolate. First.
You know what that tells you about her? Everything. Someone who understood, at the level of pure instinct, that keeping people going through something terrible isn’t only a logistical problem. It’s also a question of what makes life feel like life rather than merely survival. She knew that. She wrote it down, put it at the top, and moved on.
Dorothy Reeder was the director of the American Library in Paris from 1937 to 1941 — the largest English-language lending library on the European continent, at 10 rue du Général Camou in the 7th arrondissement. She had come to France alone from Washington, talked her way into a job in the periodicals section, worked her way to the top, and found herself running the whole operation just as the largest war in human history was arriving at the door.
She did not close the doors. She did not run. She stayed in Paris after the fall, kept the building open through four years of Occupation, and went home to America when it was over without writing a memoir or giving interviews or apparently considering herself the kind of person stories get written about.
The American Library in Paris is still there. Still open. Still lending. Dorothy Reeder has a small plaque. She deserves considerably more than that, and France has never quite got around to saying so, which is — when you sit with it — almost perfectly French.
What follows is for paid subscribers: the morning war was declared and every single staff member came in without being called; the German officer who recognised Reeder from library conferences before the war; the underground network that kept books moving to Jewish readers banned from the building; the staff member shot by the Gestapo; the Countess whose son had married into Vichy, and how that connection, of all things, helped keep the Library alive; and what it means that Samuel Beckett came back to borrow books the moment the war was over.
This is what MyFrenchLife™ – MaVieFrançaise® looks like at its paid depth: stories that matter, properly researched, written for people who find France endlessly worth understanding.
Become an Annual subscriber or a Mighty Supporter and read on.