MJH | Stories Survive: “I Am André” Book Talk

Diana Mara Henry’s I Am André is an amazing real-life story of espionage, of courage and resistance, and of friendship and love. It pulls back the veil on the hidden history of the struggle for the identity of the Resistance in France. The life of ‘André’ Joseph Scheinmann is more intriguing and compelling than any work of fiction. His true-life story of derring-do starts in Munich, as a Jewish youth whose family moves to France in 1933 to escape the Nazi tide. He joins the French army at the outbreak of WW2 and escapes from a prisoner-of war camp after the bitterly brief fight for France in the summer of 1940. André becomes a spy and saboteur for the British and Free French while working undercover as translator and liaison with the German high command at the Brittany headquarters of the French National Railroads. Summoned by the British, he clandestinely crosses the Channel for initiation and training as an MI6 agent in England. His network betrayed during his absence, he is arrested on his return to France. André then begins an even more perilous journey through interrogations in Gestapo prisons and the little-known Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, before being transferred to Dachau and Allach, ahead of the advancing Allies. Many vintage photographs and letters from his agents come to illustrate this heart-pounding story of a debonair young man in a broken world who remade himself as a cunning fighter for freedom.

Diana Mara Henry has devoted her professional life to social causes and political movements. She grew up speaking French and attended the Lycée Français de NY. Her concentration at university (Brandeis MA 2000, Harvard B.A. 1969, Ferguson History Prize, 1967) was in Government; she was an editor at the Harvard Crimson. Her first great accomplishment was in photojournalism. After her initial visit to concentration camp Natzweiler/KLNa in 1985, her independent scholarship focused on the camp and its political prisoners. André Joseph Scheinmann and Diana worked together to create this final version of his memoirs. After he was gone, she discovered much of his past that remained in the shadows. That story came to light when the family vault yielded a treasure trove – the letters that he kept for the honor of his comrades in the struggle and the government papers of three countries to document his true identity in dark times. She has been invited to present at academic conferences around the world to speak about Natzweiler and about André, but she came to know him best through her work on this book, as seen at www.iamandre.live.

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