In 1942, a Russian-Jewish émigré named Irène Némirovsky was deported from France under the Jewish Statutes and sent to her death in Auschwitz. Her daughters went into hiding and survived the war, all the while carrying a suitcase that contained their mother's notebook. They did not decipher its pages until half a century later, when the elder daughter resolved to confide her mother's last words to the archives of the Institut mémoire de l'édition contemporaine. When she opened the notebook, what emerged was a fierce portrait of France's defeat and occupation by Germany and one of the first literary works to document the country's wartime experience. The fate of Némirovsky's unfinished book, which lay dormant in its box until it surfaced several decades later to unanimous acclaim, captures the belated quality of France's memory of the war. The period 1940-44 is known as the dark years, or les années noires. Its memory has been described as an ever-growing corpse that remains too warm for an autopsy and resists the closure of national burial. Historian Henry Rousso describes the Occupation and its afterlife as a “syndrome” from which the nation has yet to recover: “The Vichy syndrome consists of a diverse set of symptoms whereby the trauma of the Occupation, and particularly the traumas resulting from internal divisions within France, reveals itself in political, social, and cultural life.” Indeed, the French defeat provoked a veritable civil war between different sectors of the nation's population, a guerre franco-française pitting those who supported or accommodated the occupying forces against those who resisted. As the metaphor of the syndrome suggests, the trauma of France's wartime experience is far from over. Its after-effects continue to reverberate in the nation's collective memory and cultural imagination.