A Scholar’s Examination of a World War II Legacy
By: Jeff Joiner | August 11, 2025
Rebecca Thompson MA’14, PhD’18 is constantly searching for hidden jewels tucked away in the vastness of the internet. The author and French translator searches archives and websites for manuscripts, books and journals written in French that can be translated into English, broadly expanding the audience for unknown but remarkable stories.
Several years ago, Thompson found just such a gem that resulted in a heart-rendering story of a young Frenchman’s time forced to work in Nazi Germany that, following five years of translation and editing, was published as a book. To Thompson, the story is an example of the wealth of first-person and self-published material available to be discovered and shared with the world.
“I have this tendency to fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and I absolutely love just finding random stuff,” Thompson said. “In this case, I stumbled across a manuscript on a French website that caught my attention, and it began work to tell this really interesting story.”
Thompson graduated from UT Dallas with a master’s degree in literature and a PhD in literature with a focus on translation studies from what is now the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. A student of French from middle school through college, she studied extensively with faculty in the Center for Translation Studies, a draw for the Buffalo, New York, native to study at UTD.
“I worked a lot with professors at the center, including taking classes with the director and founder Rainer Schulte and studying with Sean Cotter who had a big influence on me,” Thompson said. “All of the faculty that I worked with were really influential, especially my PhD committee chair David Patterson.”
Thomspon also took courses at the UT Dallas Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies where she earned a certificate for her coursework that has benefited one of her major areas of research, Nazi-occupied France during World War II. As the chair of modern languages and a French teacher at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Buffalo, she divides her time between the college preparatory high school and researching French literary topics including World War II history.
That research led her to the Wikipedia link to primary source material about a notorious Nazi forced-labor program that required workers from occupied countries to work in German war industries. The reference linked to the memoir of an elderly Frenchman, now passed away, who as a young man was forced to work in Berlin during the war. As Thompson read the memoir in French, she realized Jean Louis Mary Pasquiers’ story of perseverance as a forced laborer was fascinating and deserved more attention than being lost on an obscure website. She decided to translate Pasquiers’ story into English, which was published as “Passing Misery” this spring.
“When I was skimming Pasquiers’ 300,000-word manuscript, I realized that he had a talent for taking this giant span of history, beginning with his childhood, and constructing this narrative that made you feel like you were chatting with a friend,” Thompson said. “It’s not just historically relevant, he’s communicating in a way that is really accessible.”
As a young student studying to be a teacher early in the war, Pasquiers found himself in 1942 caught in the call up of French citizens to participate in an obligatory work service program supporting wartime industries in Germany. After briefly hiding from authorities, Pasquiers volunteered for service at a factory in Berlin where he worked as a clerk. It was fortunate for Pasquiers that he spoke fluent German, which led to an office assignment rather than laboring on a factory floor.
Though Pasquiers enjoyed more freedom than many other forced laborers working for the Nazis, he still faced frequent shortages of food, threats of violence and frequently experienced firsthand the Allied bombing campaigns targeting German cities. At one point, he and fellow workers helped retrieve bodies of fellow laborers killed during the bombing of their camp.
Pasquiers spent the remainder of the war working in Germany until the Nazis were defeated in 1945 when he was repatriated and sent home. He became a teacher and spent the rest of his life working in education and pursuing a post-war passion ― organizing student exchanges between France and Germany to rebuild trust and friendship between the two former enemies.
Pasquiers kept a journal of his time working in Germany during the war, which became the basis for his manuscript that he began writing while in his early 90s. He uploaded the project, part diary and part memoir, to a website and it was there that Thompson discovered it. Pasquiers died in 2013 before his effort received any attention.
“It’s really interesting because he waited until the end of his life to write it all down,” Thompon said. “It’s a story about what a person will do to survive a difficult situation. What he went through was not on the same par as victims of the Holocaust, but it’s something that he didn’t want to be vilified for.”
Though he was held in a forced labor camp, Pasquiers enjoyed a certain amount of freedom as a French citizen working for the Nazis. Thompson said some witnesses could claim he and others like him were collaborators with the Germans, a prospect that Pasquiers himself may have feared.
“This is a story that’s meant to make you think about how far a person would go to keep themselves and their family safe,” Thompson said. “Would that make someone guilty even though they had no choice?”
Thompson said the story is one of a thin line between what is considered collaboration.
“Did Pasquiers collaborate with the Nazis? That’s such a loaded word,” Thompson said. “It’s a complex story about the decisions of one man torn among concerns of politics, morality, duty and survival.”