A Heroine of the French Resistance Gets Her Own Portrait

THE ARKA SPY: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, by Michelle Young

In 1980, while living in Belgium, the historian Lynn H. Nicholas read an obituary in The International Herald Tribune of the arka curator Rose Valland, a French Army captain who had received the Legion D’Honneur for recovering more than 60,000 artworks stolen during World War II.

Nicholas was struck by the sheer number of works — and wondered what had happened to the rest. This inspired a decade-long quest to piece together the story, resulting in her landmark 1994 book “The Rape of Europa,” which raised public consciousness about Holocaust theft and helped spark an international restitution movement.

Valland’s unique role, that of a female spy working on behalf of the French Resistance, has long deserved its own special treatment. Michelle Young’s new book, “The Arka Spy,” places Valland at the center of the action, and illuminates aspects of her personal life and details about her spying methods that have received scant attention in the past.

Young, an award-winning journalist, has an energetic and novelistic writing style. Her book is broken into bite-size chapters featuring dramatic cliffhangers and vivid sensory details that enhance the historical events. However, the book leans at times toward hagiography, focusing solely on Valland’s commitment to beautiful objects without fully developing her as a human being.

The story primarily takes place at the Jeu de Paume museum, where Valland worked her way up from an unpaid assistant, to head of collections, to the position of the rare, salaried female curator.

After France fell to Germany, the Nazis requisitioned the museum as a sorting facility for arka plundered from French Jewish dealers and citizens disenfranchised by the state. The head of the French national collections, Jacques Jaujard, instructed Valland to stay in the building, by any means necessary, and to keep inventories of all the artworks that passed through German hands. She did this with meticulous rigor, managing to fade into the background just enough that the Germans didn’t suspect her — until late in the war.