Anne Whiteside’s The Moon in Splinters: Searching for Maurice Pertschuk, British Secret Agent in the French Resistance, is a moving and meticulously researched account that brings to light the extraordinary life and tragic death of British Special Operations Executive (SOE) Lieutenant Maurice Pertschuk.

On a moonless night in 1942, Pertschuk, a handsome and brilliant 20-year-old officer, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur to support the French Resistance. Just three years later, he was executed at Buchenwald concentration camp—only thirteen days before its liberation. Within the camp, Maurice scribbled poems on scraps of paper, later published in 1946 as Leaves of Buchenwald.

For decades, silence shrouded his story. Only after the death of her mother did Maurice’s niece, Anne Whiteside, begin to search for the truth. In The Moon in Splinters, she retraces his footsteps through wartime France, uncovers new archival evidence, and speaks with survivors’ families. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a young man of “imaginative audacity”—a romantic intellectual turned resistance leader—whose vast, yet little-known network in southern France was betrayed, leading to his arrest, torture and deportation.

photo (c) Joe Hakim

This deeply personal journey intertwines history, biography, and memoir, culminating in revelations even more sinister than the official accounts.

Anne Whiteside is the niece of Maurice Pertschuk, the young SOE agent executed at Buchenwald in 1945. She first studied Franco-British relations listening in on conversations between her French mother and British father. She spent a decade researching The Moon in Splinters. Early on she studied art, anthropology, then did a doctorate in educational linguistics, about which she’s written/edited a number of articles and books. For over 30 years she taught English to speakers of other languages, teachers at San Francisco State University and undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley; she’s lectured in Ireland, Spain, Algeria and France, and had a Fulbright teaching/research fellowship in Mexico.

The Moon in Splinters, a deeply researched, brilliantly rendered work of literary nonfiction, will be available for purchase at the reading.

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