AUTHOR’S NOTE
My late father-in-law, co-pilot of an Allied bomber shot down by a German fighter plane over Belgium during the Second World War, owed his eventual escape from Occupied Europe to the help he received from members of the French Resistance, including a teenager he would remember as “the girl in the blue beret.” Inspired by my father-in-law’s wartime experience, The Girl in the Blue Beret is nonetheless a work of fiction: names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of my imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.