How does a society live with memories such as these? How do the experiences of atrocities endure among those who witnessed them, were victimized by them or collaborated in them? And how do those memories persist when the witnesses are dead and gone? Nossiter’s intimate study of France’s awkward lies and troubled silences about World War II tries “to get as close as possible to the question of what it might mean to live with the past,” he writes. He introduces a beautifully drawn cast of characters, extracting insights from each. This is not a polemic, nor a dry analytic history. It’s an elegantly written and deeply troubling portrait of humanity touched by enormous inhumanity.

Nossiter, who previously wrote a book about memories of the murder of U.S. civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, researched this work by living for several months in the French towns where he thought World War II recollections would be most acute: Bordeaux, Vichy and Tulle. The book’s first part follows the long trial of the ambitious French bureaucrat Maurice Papon as it unfolded in Bordeaux four years ago, when Papon was 87. Under the Vichy government set up in 1940 in cooperation with the German conquerors, Papon headed the office that organized the deportation of more than 1,500 Jews from Bordeaux to Nazi death camps. The fact that Papon was not held accountable for this action until 55 years after the event–and that he rose to be a Gaullist minister after the war–says much about the collective amnesia that settled over the French. “There were apparently two levels of understand-ing,” writes Nossiter. “There was the past that served for everyday use, and then there was another past, informed by memory and conscience, more difficult to acknowledge.”

Among Bordeaux’s aristocrats, wine barons and bourgeoisie, Nossiter observes the willful forgetfulness and lingering anti-Semitism that allow many to sympathize with Papon. This much one might expect. Yet Nossiter admits that by the end of the trial, even he feels a certain empathy for the old man–not for his actions, certainly, but for his dignity and intelligence. “The attempts to demonize him failed,” says Nossiter. “He was more unsettling than any demon.” When Papon is convicted of illegal arrests and detention but not of murder, Nossiter concludes that the verdict is just. But he leaves Bordeaux troubled by the ambiguous emotions he discovered there in the society and in himself.

At Vichy, the picture grows more complex and disturbing. This town, famous as a spa before the war, was taken as the capital of unoccupied, collaborationist France mainly because it had so many hotel rooms. The opulent four-star Hotel du Parc became the seat of government, and the two-star Algeria Hotel the headquarters of the Commissariat Generale aux Questions Juives, which supervised the overall confiscation of Jewish assets and the deportation of the Jews themselves.

Marshal Petain, the head of this rump state exiled from occupied Paris, instituted a quasi-Fascist government and preached a conservative Roman Catholic rectitude deeply colored by racism. Meanwhile, his people indulged themselves in an orgy of wine, food and sex in their hotel-room offices or the town’s sumptuous bordellos. And today? While there are many in Vichy who insist that the government there was just a passing phase and a few who look back in shame, there are also some who are nostalgic and seem to have learned nothing.

Because most people in Bordeaux and Vichy did not suffer greatly during the war, their memories are argumentative and self-aggrandizing. In Tulle, in a narrow valley on the Correze River, no family was untouched by the mass execution carried out in June 1944 by the Germans as a reprisal for an assault by the Resistance. And yet here, too, memory has been distorted. The Resistance action is forgotten, heroes are remembered who were never heroes, villains who were, perhaps, never villains. Memory has come to be felt as a surreal dream fashioned from nooses and cherry trees, corpses and accordions because, Nossiter concludes, “events that could have occurred in a dream could be thought of, in some inner recess, as not having occurred at all.”

“The Algeria Hotel,” which set out to study the way memories live, tells us, in fact, a great deal about how they die: glossed over, ignored, assimilated into comfortable myth. Perhaps memory is always an exercise in self-deception. For the French who found the reality of their own actions in World War II too much to bear, an elaborate forgetfulness has become a sad credit to their imagination.