PHILADELPHIA -- In the summer of 1944, three young people, unknown to one another and separated by background and nationality, were hurled together by fate. They were an American bomber pilot, a young French schoolteacher and a British secret service agent; their lives were changed forever when their paths converged in a small village in France just after D-Day.

"In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot's Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany" by Thomas Childers tells this true and dramatic story of the war in France, the horrors of Buchenwald, and the POW camps of Nazi Germany as experienced by the men and women who were there.

On June 14, 1944, just southeast of Paris, an Eighth Air Force bomber went down in flames and a young American aviator, Roy Allen, parachuted to safety and was separated from his men.

A civilian, Colette Florin, risked her own safety to hide the downed pilot from the Germans in the rooms above the tiny girls' school where she taught. While Allen was being hidden, he and Florin met Pierre Mulsant, the British -trained leader of the resistance in their region, who worked to keep Allen out of enemy hands. But Allen is compelled to flee through rural France to Paris and is eventually captured and sent to Buchenwald.

Throughout this harrowing experience, Allen did not forget Florin and Mulsant, and, upon liberation in 1945, he resolved to find them.

Reconstructing this story from first-hand interviews with the survivors of these events as well as from extensive research based on memoirs, diaries, letters, courtroom testimony and military records in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, Thomas Childers brings each character's terror throughout every day of World War II alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Childers is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. The recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, a German Marshall Fund Research Fellowship and numerous other grants and awards, he is the author of four previous books on National Socialism and World War II, including "Wings of Morning."