War throws up every side of humanity; good, bad, ugly and evil. It is the tragedy of war that we sometimes see the very good exposed to, and destroyed by, the very bad. Such is the case with Lieutenant Maurice Pertshuk, arrested by the SD in France and eventually sent to Buchenwald where he was murdered by a regime that did such things for pleasure.
The Moon in Splinters is the story of a niece’s search for her lost - and by now long unknown uncle, a man she never met but who has always been in her heart. Anne Whiteside’s journey is one of discovering a man who started with no story, or perhaps a distorted and erroneous one, to the knowledge that he was in fact one of the most brilliant of the SOE agents we sent to live within the heart of the Nazi beast. The journey to find Maurice Pertshuk is in fact a story that ends up discovering that he embodied all the virtues that would eventually destroy German state fascism.
This book is the story of Anne’s detective work over a decade and more. Sometimes irritating (she is too easy to dismiss the late Professor Michael (MRD) Foot, who was of enormous help to many of us starting out in the area of resistance studies, as without him we would not have the story of F Section in France), it is nevertheless important to understand how fury at his apparently casual assumption that it was Pertchuk’s incompetence that led to his own demise, drove her search. And we are better for it, because her remarkable investigatory skills have produced a result that we perhaps might not have expected at the start of the journey; namely, a vibrant, wonderful picture of a virtuous, confident and capable young soldier resurrected from the ashes of memory and history. In so doing she has challenged MRD Foot’s famous stricture to us not to sentimentalise our subjects and give them a virtue in death they may not have enjoyed in life. Stick with it: The Moon in Splinters is a remarkable book and I am a better man for having read it.
