Edited by Judy Barrett-Litoff.

Fordham University Press. 270 pages. $29.95.

 An American Heroine in the French Resistance is based on Virginia d’Albert-Lake’s wartime diary, which she kept from the beginning of World War II until her capture by the Germans on June 12, 1944, and her prison memoir written immediately after the war, both edited by Jean Barrett Litoff, a professor of history at Bryant University. Bryant staff, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Providence Public Library, the Naval War College in Newport, all helped on the research, and the Rhode Island School of Design prepared the maps.

These pages capture the compassion and toughness of a nearly forgotten heroine as they provide an invaluable record of the workings of the French Resistance by one of the very few American women who participated in it.

D’Albert-Lake turns out to be a good storyteller, as well. The book begins with a quote from her memoir describing her feelings when she was arrested on June 12, 1944, as she escorted a downed American airman through occupied territory to a hidden forest encampment near Châteaudun, France:

Something broke inside me. I knew somehow that it was all over. There was no more reason to hope. The sun that only a few minutes ago was so bright and warm now seemed eclipsed by a gray fog. Disappointment and fear clothed me in a hot vapor. Sweat started in my armpits; my scalp tingled; I had no choice but to stand there in the center of the dusty road, grip my (bicycle) handlebars, and wait.

She would spend the next 11 months as a German prisoner of war, much of it at the infamous Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women, where she almost died.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Virginia was raised in St. Petersburg, Fla., graduated from Rollins College, then made a side trip to France where she met and fell in love with a young Frenchman, Philippe d’Albert-Lake. They were married in 1937 and moved to Philippe’s apartment at 57 rue de Bellechasse, in Paris.

She began keeping her diary at the outbreak of the war, describing how she had “adjusted myself to this new strange state of living, in a kind of suspension, just waiting and hoping, while time itself seems to have neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow.” Her last diary entry, dated April 1944, was written after she and Philippe had become actively involved in the work of the Comet Escape Line, but she was careful to provide no clue about their clandestine activities, and provided no indication that their country home and their apartment in Paris now served as safe houses for downed airmen.

After her liberation from prison, she picked up the story again in her memoir, which she later titled My Story. It detailed her work with the Resistance, her capture by the Germans, the horrors of her imprisonment at Ravensbruck and other prisons, and her eventual reunion with Philippe in May 1945. Virginia wrote the memoir as a letter to her mother who had worked tirelessly for her release, but who died of leukemia in mid-April 1944, unaware of the ultimate fate of her daughter.