The Silence of the Sea

An elderly man and his young niece are made to billet a German officer in their own house. Unable to refuse him the room, they refuse him everything else, and never speak a single word to him.

Werner von Ebrennac turns out to be a courteous Francophile who wants nothing more than friendship between his country and theirs, and who talks into their silence night after night about the union of Germany and France he believes is coming. What breaks him is not their refusal but his own discovery of what his compatriots actually intend for France.

Jean Bruller wrote it in occupied Paris in 1942 and published it under the name Vercors through Les Éditions de Minuit, the clandestine press he co-founded to print it. It was the first underground book of the occupation, and it became a symbol of resistance conducted entirely in the mind.