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The Comet Line
The Belgian Girls follows two young women resisting German occupation in Belgium, one during World War I as an intelligence agent, and the other during World War II involved in resistance efforts. What interested you about portraying courage as something that can look different from one person to another?
My first book, Women Heroes of World War II, includes the most heroic stories of Second World War resistance that I could find at the time, including the one that inspired me as a young adult: Corrie ten Boom, the devout Dutch resister who was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for hiding Jewish people from the Nazis. I always wondered if I would have the guts to do what she did, to put my own life on the line for the sake of conviction. And as I saw Women Heroes of WWII gain a fairly large audience, I thought that perhaps some young readers, when encountering the book’s stories of remarkable courage, might entertain the same self-doubt I had. That’s why, while writing The Belgian Girls, I deliberately gave the fictional Julienne a quiet, reserved disposition, to illustrate that courage is a choice, not a personality type.
Gabrielle Petit’s personality was basically how she is portrayed in the novel!
Family history becomes an important bridge between the two timelines. What interested you about exploring the ways one generation’s experiences can shape another?
When one of my sons dressed up as WWI American hero, Sergeant Alvin York, I asked my WWII vet father to identify which historical character he was trying to portray. He guessed immediately. That was the first time I realized part of the Greatest Generation’s alacrity in signing up for the military after Pearl Harbor was that they had been raised on stories of the previous war’s heroes. Then, while writing my books on the two world wars, I discovered a generational inspiration factor among Europeans. For instance, WWII special agent Pearl Witherington, who led an enormous team of French fighters against the Nazis, was inspired by Louise de Bettignies, the French First World War spy Kate Quinn wrote about in The Alice Network. And as I point out in The Belgian Girls, Andree de Jongh, founder of the Comet Line, was inspired by Gabrielle Petit and Edith Cavell, both of whom worked against the German occupation of Belgium during World War I.
What challenges come with placing fictional characters alongside people who actually lived through these events?
Actually, it was great fun. An author of nonfiction has to make certain that every sentence is absolutely factual. For once, I was free to make things up, to fill in the blanks of what I already knew about Gabrielle’s life and work and everything I already knew about the young women who worked on the Comet Line.
Why do you think stories about women’s roles in wartime resistance continue to resonate so strongly with readers?
Everyone loves a good underdog story, and it can be stated that women in the first half of the 20th century were underdogs, often considered less valuable, less qualified, and less capable than men. But because of the strange reality created by war, women rose to challenges not normally afforded to them. And those who prospered in those unusual circumstances continue to inspire us today.
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When the Germans overrun Brussels during the First World War, Gabrielle is infuriated to see her newfound happiness shattered. It isn’t long before she is faced with an impossible choice. Three decades later, shy and bookish Julienne moves to Brussels with her widowed father at the height of the Nazi occupation and is horrified to witness the city’s callous treatment of Jews.
In this dual timeline novel inspired by the life of Belgian spy Gabrielle Petit, two very different young women must discover their inner strength to become the heroes their city needs. And when loyalties are tested and decades-old secrets are revealed, their legacies will become entwined forever.
Written by historian and storyteller Kathryn J. Atwood, The Belgian Girls is a tale of hope, forgiveness, and the healing power of friendship.
The Belgian Girls
Kathryn J. Atwood’s The Belgian Girls is a historical novel built around two young women resisting German occupation in Belgium, one during World War I and the other during World War II. Gabrielle Petit, based on the real Belgian intelligence agent and national hero, begins her story in 1913 as a spirited young woman searching for love and belonging. Nearly thirty years later, the fictional Julienne Gobert arrives in occupied Brussels grieving her mother and struggling with anxiety, fear, and a sense that she’s too fragile to make much difference. Atwood alternates between their stories until the connection between them becomes increasingly personal. Gabrielle’s letters, Julienne’s father Maurice, and the long shadow of an earlier occupation gradually bind the two timelines together.
What makes the novel especially engaging is the difference between its two heroines. Gabrielle is fiery almost from the start. She speaks her mind, challenges expectations, and eventually chooses intelligence work even when it threatens the future she once imagined with Maurice. Julienne’s courage develops more quietly. At first, simply helping Jewish customers who are being harassed by German soldiers leaves her trembling. As she becomes involved with the Comet Line and helps move downed Allied airmen toward safety, fear doesn’t disappear, but it stops making her decisions for her. That progression gives Julienne’s story real emotional weight. By the time she crosses the Pyrenees and risks her life at the Bidasoa River, her transformation feels earned because Atwood has allowed us to remember the frightened girl she was in the opening chapters.
Readers of Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network will find familiar territory here, and Atwood acknowledges Quinn’s novel as an inspiration in her author’s note. Both books bring women’s wartime intelligence work into historical fiction and show just how much dangerous resistance depended on people who could move through ordinary streets without looking like soldiers. The Belgian Girls, though, has its own particular focus. Its heart is Belgium itself and the strange experience of one country enduring German occupation twice within a generation. Gabrielle’s resistance during the first war becomes part of the moral inheritance of Julienne’s generation during the second. The novel also makes good use of real history alongside fictional characters, particularly through the Comet Line, Andrée de Jongh, Florentino Goicoechea, and Gabrielle Petit’s eventual arrest and execution.
Atwood writes in an accessible, emotionally direct style that fits a story centered on choices made under extraordinary pressure. There’s romance, espionage, family conflict, hidden airmen, secret reports, betrayal, imprisonment, and escape, but the book keeps returning to a simpler question: what does a person owe the people and places they love? Maurice, Gabrielle, Julienne, Aimée, the Lejeunes, Marie, and even the deeply compromised Cecile answer that question in very different ways. I especially liked the decision to end in liberated Brussels at Gabrielle Petit’s statue, where the two generations finally come together, and Maurice is able to make peace with a part of his past. The Belgian Girls reads as a tribute to resistance carried out by ordinary people, particularly young women whose work demanded courage without uniforms, weapons, or public recognition.
Pages: 269 | ASIN : B0F4LY787R
