About Fred Coleman
As Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief, Fred Coleman befriended Andrei Sakharov and other Russian dissidents. He admired the way they stood up against Soviet repression. His prize-winning reporting on human rights in the USSR led him to the similar struggle of Moussa and Odette Abadi against Nazi atrocities, as recounted in 'The Marcel Network', his second book. While reporting for Newsweek, Coleman rode a Soviet tank out of Afghanistan. He interviewed the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the first president of post-communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin. As the magazine’s diplomatic correspondent, based in Washington, he travelled the world with three American secretaries of state. Later, as a longtime Paris correspondent for Newsweek and other publications, Coleman covered terrorist attacks and the launch of the euro. He once lived for a week with the French Foreign Legion. Fred Coleman grew up in Oakland, California, and graduated from Princeton University. His first book, 'The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire', was published by St. Martin’s Press. He and his French wife, Nadine, live in Paris.
About 'The Marcel Network'
Syrian immigrant Moussa Abadi was only 33, and his future wife, Odette Rosenstock, 28, when they found themselves trapped in Nazi-occupied France. This young Jewish couple—he a graduate student in theater, and she a doctor—was poor but resolute. Risking their own lives and relying on false papers, the Abadis hid Jewish children in Catholic schools and convents and with Protestant families. In 1943, their clandestine organization—the Marcel Network—became one of the most successful operations of Jewish resistance in Europe. By the end of the war, 527 children owed their survival to the Abadis. Yet their improbable success came with almost unspeakable sacrifice. As an example of what just two people of good will can accomplish in the face of crimes against humanity, the Abadis' story is a lesson in moral and physical courage. Drawn from a multitude of sources, including hundreds of documents in the Abadis' archives and dozens of interviews with the now grown children they rescued, Fred Coleman tells the Abadis' full story for the first time. The Marcel Network also breaks historic ground, and reveals how the Catholic Church, French Christians, and Jews themselves did far more to save Jewish lives than is generally known.
'The Marcel Network' was a Book of the Month Club selection in January 2013