This book acts as an investigation into the legacy of France's years of occupation. As a child in the 1960s, Adam Nossiter grew up in a France that was desperate to believe in its innocence in World War II. Collaboration with the crimes of the Nazi regime was a subject never dwelt on, or fiercely denied, until years later. This is Nossiter's story of coming to terms with this hidden history in the 1990s, as he traveled to France looking for evidence of how people lived--and still live--with the damage done in those years. The result is a searching and disturbing narrative of today's France as it emerges from the shadow of the war and its crimes, and also a far-reaching revelation of deep truths about how we remember and why we forget.