Speaker 1: Aro dot net is a fantastic place to grow inside
your world of podcasts listening. Come on now, it's like there,
but what do you want to listen to? Can I
have a choice?
Speaker 2: Please? Right?
Speaker 1: Well, that's why we designed Arrow dot net. R r
Oe dot net. I mean we're talking with ya authors.
How about those people that work at an actual grocery
store on CTCs Footy Paradise beyond the calling the choice
as well as my day of play. There is so
much to choose from twenty different podcasts to fit into
your day. Enjoy your exploration on Ero dot net A
R r Oe dot net. Hello and good morning. How
are you?
Speaker 3: I'm good? How are you? Errow?
Speaker 1: Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with
you because I think that we're in a place in
history right now that needs this story because we're forgetting
way too much of those that were before us, and
we need to have their knowledge, their experiences, and their
outreach in order to be where we are now, to
be stronger.
Speaker 3: Oh that's amazing. I love that take on it. You know,
history teaches us stuff before we get on the air,
and you know the lessons are there for us. The mistakes,
the things that worked, all of that, it's all there.
Speaker 1: Well, what about you personally when you put a book
like this together? Did you not also learn some valuable lessons?
Speaker 3: Oh? Did I ever? And I mean, you know, we
live in France half the year for one thing, and
I didn't go into doing this to write this book.
What happened was I just got fascinated by the history
of it. Yes, and we have friends over there that
have family who were actually alive during that time and
were part of the resistance movement, and so different time,
different circumstances, but definitely, you know, we learn quite a
bit about loyalty and betrayal and all sorts of things
like that that you know, and knowing your network of friends,
all of that.
Speaker 1: The name of the book that we're talking about today
is called We Choose Resistance. To me, this is a
story of know the people that you're with. In other words,
it's like, you know, people come together behind the scenes
or as they say, underground. Well, that could be your
only answer if things above ground get a little rough up.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. I mean you the first law with
the resistance network, excuse me, is that you know the
people around you. And so for even now when we
go over and we're in France, the people that we
meet in France, the older people in particular, we have
to be introduced through someone they know before they'll actually
really open up. Yes, I mean, it's just fascinating how
it all works out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you pop in a generation alpha or beta in there,
they're gonna be saying, hey, what's going on, man, I've
been seeing your website. Your entire bean is right there
on social media, no wonder the other side is knocking
on your door wanting to take over. And a book
like this says, calm down, calm down, group up. Let's all,
you know, be belong together here and let's see if
we can help each other out. And the thing that
inspired me the most about this, you know, with the
French soldiers is the fact they didn't just keep that
information for themselves. They helped other people come back into
their own countries and give it back to them.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. And the French resistance itself in the
first years of the war, the people that were really
the beginners who started pulling this all together were soldiers
from the French army who were very upset with General
Petain in the General in Frances called a marshall, and
they were so upset with him for folding with the Germans,
and so a whole bunch of them sort of began,
you know, working on their own. You also had people
coming in from Germany and from Italy, and the beginnings
of the French resistance was a very disparate group. They
were also of all beliefs. Some were politically you know, socialists, communists,
religious people and Jewish people and minorities like the Roma,
the Gypsies, they called them in France, and they all
got together and said, we know we have differences, We're
putting them aside for now, we have one common enemy
that we need to defeat. And that's what they did.
Speaker 1: Wow, when you're writing about courage, sacrifice and really kind
of convincing your heart to take a dare and to
take a chance, how do you prepare yourself as that
author to make it real for those that are about
ready to receive it? In other words, with today's you
know writing. If we don't put it in our own words,
then then our legacy is determined by people on the outside.
How were you able to make that declaration in the
way making sure that it stayed authentic and it wasn't
based on the interpretation of.
Speaker 3: Well. First of all, when I started the research on
this book, I was lucky enough to have five or
three excuse me, in person interviews with people who actually
lived during that time, and one was her name with
Sean tal Dupuy. None of the three are with us
any longer, but she had four brothers and sisters and
all the whole family was part of the resistance, and
we had multiple lunches and interviews with her and with
two others who were on the ground during that time
and were able to tell me what it was like.
And that family actually hid three downed Allied soldiers for
a year and kept them safe. They had next door
to them what was called the Malice, which was the
French police. Now it was a rural area, but this man,
who was basically a police officer would come frequently and
say have you seen these soldiers and they go, oh, no, no, no,
we haven't seen them. We don't know anything about that.
So that's what I started with, you know, knowing the
sacrifices that these people had, and so going into the book,
I didn't want to write about just one person. I
wanted to write about a village of people, and I
wanted to show what they had done, you know, how
they did this, And so it took me a good
five years to write it and do the research itself.
So the book itself starts. I stuck with a small
time period, the months before D Day and after D
Day in a region that I know well, and to
begin the book, it's easier for me as a writer
to talk about to know the landscape in the setting
and try to imagine what it was like during that time.
And so I began there, and then I looked at
the different philosophies of what was going on during that time.
I mean, you had French people that thought it was
great that the Germans were there. You had people who said,
I'm not dealing with this at all. I'm closing the
doors and I'm going to hide. And then you had
people who said, well, I'm going to do whatever I
can to help. They were going to resist in some way. Now,
resistance could have taken the form of hiding people, of
bringing people food, of actually picking up a gun in fighting,
of blowing up a train line or a bridge or whatever.
So that was very it was for me that was
instrumental in forming the characters. And so one of my
main characters, well I have five main characters in the book,
but the first one is she opens a book. Her
name is d and she is a spy for Churchill's
Special Operations Executive and her job was just to go
in there and try to form an alliance the real
Pearl Corneoli. She and the other SUE agents were to
try to form an alliance with the resistance. The Resistance
saying no way, how do we know you from Britain
are not going to just take us over the same
way the Germans are. So it took a while, yeah, exactly.
So she finally was able. Her French was fluent, and
she oversaw in nineteen forty four, prior to D Day
something like two thousand Resistance agents that had come in
that we're working now at that point in the war.
One thing happened that really turned the whole thing. Hitler
in nineteen forty three started saying I need everybody from
the Agent twelve up to work in my factories. So
families said to their kids, get out, go just go
hide in the woods, do whatever, and a lot of
those young people join resistance circuits in their areas, became
very active at great risks to their families.
Speaker 1: I would say, that's so interesting that you bring that up,
because I've been with the members of the punk rock
boot the group the Sex Pistols, and they gave me
an education pretty much like that.
Speaker 2: In the way of saying you.
Speaker 1: Have no idea what we have been through, you have
to understand that when it's survival, it may come across
as punk rock, but it's our life. There are stories there,
and that's the whole thing about it is we don't
know the stories unless it comes through the music or
thank god that we've got a book like this from
you to where we can understand rather than sit here
and assume like we have been all these years.
Speaker 3: That's right. And the other thing to remember when you
study history, a lot of history is anecdotal and it's fluid. So, yes,
we have the facts, we have the fact of d Day, right, yes,
but we have all these anecdotal stories. Like two of
the people that I interviewed had not talked about what
happened to them during that time, even with their families,
and they said the kids said they won't talk to you,
And I said, well, can you just ask them, you know,
ask them for me? And they did, and they, I
think because we had mutual friends, they said yes, they
would sit down. Well, three hours later we got out
of there. And it was really interesting because both of
those interviewed were kids during the war, okay, and one
was seven years old. They lived in two different villages,
and as kids, what they would do is they would
make spike sticks. Because think about this, the bridges and
the train lines and the roads were always being destroyed
either by the Allies, the resistance or by the Germans themselves.
So when the Germans rebuilt a bridge, say across the
Loire River, it would be a very you know, cragile
sort of structure that they'd put together just to get across,
maybe sort of like a pontoon thing. And so these
kids would make these sticks, and they would make spikes
to stick in the road to blow out the tires
of the German cars. And he was like seven years
old at this time when he was doing this. Another
person in another village they hardly did anything because her,
the person that was overseeing that village who was German,
was horrible, and so anything that the resistance did, there
would be repercussions in the village, and the repercussions might
be that two people were shot and hung in the
village that had nothing to do with it. They were
just innocent citizens. So there were risks to be taken.
But these people went for the higher what they felt
was the higher ground, what they felt was the morality
that they had to follow. They could not do what
they felt. For instance, the Catholic Church was saying the
Catholic Church at that time was saying, you follow the
law of the land, so that means Hitler's the law
of the land, so you follow it. Well, the Jesuit
priests in Paris said, no way, we are not doing this.
Speaker 1: That I've heard that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And there were several so the Jesuits and actually there's
a relationship. We don't have enough time here to get
into it, but I have a first hand account of
some of this through a history. But the Jesuits said,
we are going to help the resistance, this the Parisians,
and so what they did was they literally they hit people,
they forged papers, they formed networks to get people out
of the country, and a few of them did join
the resistance and pick up arms, which is totally the
antithesis of what you would expect of someone taking an
oath of peace through the church. But they saw this
as the lesser of two evils of what was going
on in France at that time.
Speaker 2: Please do not move. There's more with Margie Buokite coming
up next. We are back with author and historian Margie Buokhite.
The book we're talking about is we Choose Resistance. What
are you doing with the next level of the book? Well,
are you bringing families together social media wise or just
by meeting face to face, because this is one of
those books that deserves to have community involved as you
continue to grow forward.
Speaker 3: Well, we were a little late getting started on this,
but I love your ideas and for family reasons, we'll
just leap it at that. And what we are doing
is I'm talking to book clubs if somebody would like
me to come or even do a zoom with them.
I am doing radio interviews like with you up here.
I live in New Hampshire in the United States. What
we're doing is working through the New Hampshire Writers Project
to bring together writers at bookstores and possibly there's a
small world war two museum. Yeah so, and I am
open to all suggestions of what other people might want
me to do.
Speaker 1: I'm glad that you brought up the book club because
one of the things that I've seen a lot of
lately the retired men and women of our US forces.
Knowing we're talking about the older people, they're all gathering
together and what are they doing. They're getting people like
yourself to come in there with your books so they
can talk about it and be open and continue to
be who it is that they've been trained to become.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's exactly right, and I have through our own
New Hampshire Writers Project. I am there's a give back
on this book to a veteran's writing project.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: So anything I make on any of the sales of
this book, ten percent of that will go back to
the Writer's Project to help veterans who are processing their
own experiences in fighting wars for the United States.
Speaker 1: Wow, where can people go to find out more about you?
Because this short time period is not enough. We have
just barely scratched the surface, and you have the knowledge,
and that's where I want people to go.
Speaker 3: Okay, they can go to my website, which this marchiebook
heite dot com and on there they can find out
where to buy the book. It's It's available on all
the major platforms. I'm pushing my publisher, Keeler to try
to get it in more indie book sources. I would
love that, but for the time being, you can go there.
I also have a blog on there that explains more about,
you know, the history of some of the area where
I live and how the resistance fit into that area
and and things that were done. So for the time being,
that's sad. I have a plan for an audiobook nice
with that, I podcast together with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely absolutely. Now this is the craziest thing. Your
your last name. My wife and I were sitting here
trying to connect it to French, you know, Bouchet, it's
got you know, it's got that romance to it.
Speaker 2: And then and then you just tell me book Heite. Okay.
Speaker 1: So now I've got to ask what nationality are we talking?
Speaker 2: German? Norwegian?
Speaker 1: What what is book height?
Speaker 3: Well, actually it is a German name, but it is
from the Alsace region. Man. If you know a little
bit about the history of that version, it changed between
France and Germany. France and Germany and then it was independent,
and then so my family eventually left and came and
settled actually initially in Ohio. And the name is book Height.
So an ei is an I sounding, and an ie
in German is an e sounding and ach is a
K sounding. If that helps it all when you see
it in the future, Oh, it.
Speaker 1: Does, it does. And you being up there in Ohio
are you taking in those Buckeyes at all? Or is
that just one of those things where you don't go
near because once you've had one buck eye then you
can't put them down.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm not in Ohio anymore, I mean, okay, okay,
and I'm dealing with two feet of snow up here.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: Please come back to this show anytime in the future,
because I love where your heart is with history. We
need you, and I'm gonna say you just let that
echo when you're so. We need historians to put us
on the right path.
Speaker 3: I love that ero. And anytime you want to talk
more on this book, or you want to put together
a book club or anything, let me know and I'd
be happy to do that.
Speaker 2: Excellent.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 3: Yeah you too? Thank you? So much,