Upcoming author talks:
Books pre-signed, author speaks at the MAC Center for the Arts, Newport, Vermont, November 8,2025
Harvard Club of NY, November 10, 2025. Member event.
Temple Sinai / “Sinai Speaks” - November 26 7pm interview with Rabbi Moe Howard, https://stla.shulcloud.com/form/s
“Stories Survive” series for the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust - February 9, 2026. 7pm. Sign up here.
See Angels and Sponsors page for Michel Scheinmann talks! Very exciting….
We love independent bookstores, too....The Little Village Toy & Book Shop in Littleton, NH displayed the book face out as well! Send us a photo of I Am André at your favorite bookstore! and this just in, from The Odyssey Bookshop in Hadley, MA!
About the author….
Diana Mara Henry has devoted her professional life to social causes and political movements. She grew up speaking French and attended the Lycée Français de NY. Her concentration at university (Brandeis MA 2000, Harvard B.A. 1969, Ferguson History Prize, 1967) was in Government; she was an editor at the Harvard Crimson. Her first great accomplishment was in photojournalism. After her initial visit to concentration camp Natzweiler/KLNa in 1985, her independent scholarship focused on the camp and its political prisoners. André Joseph Scheinmann and Diana worked together to create this final version of his memoirs. After he was gone, she discovered much of his past that remained in the shadows. That story came to light when the family vault yielded a treasure trove - the letters that he kept for the honor of his comrades in the struggle and the government papers of three countries to document his true identity in dark times. She has been invited to present at academic conferences around the world to speak about Natzweiler and about André, but she came to know him best through her work on this book as seen at www.iamandre.live
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Additional information about her scholarship: Diana Mara Henry has translated and researched the memoirs, assembled a pioneering bibliography, and corresponded with survivors of Konzentrationsleger Natzweiler, creating exhibits and translating their work. In 2004 she created www.natzweiler-struthof.com and in 2006, www.callmeandre.com Her video interview of Philip Maisel is at the USHMM. She has been published in the Journal for Ecumenical Studies, Fall, 2011, and reviewed Cooke and Shepherd's Resistance in the Second World War for the Journal of Military History, April, 2015; been invited to present at conferences and symposia at the University of Salzburg, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Genocide Studies Progam of Yale University, German Studies Association Summer Workshop at the Freie Universität of Berlin, Birkbeck University of London, Monash University, UNC Charlotte's Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies, and the The 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
Please email to schedule an author talk.
About the book….
I Am André is an amazing real-life story of espionage, of courage and resistance, and of friendship and love. It pulls back the veil on the hidden history of the struggle for the identity of the Resistance in France. The life of ‘André’ Joseph Scheinmann is more intriguing and compelling than any work of fiction. His true-life story of derring-do starts in Munich, as a Jewish youth whose family moves to France in 1933 to escape the Nazi tide. He joins the French army at the outbreak of WW2 and escapes from a prisoner-of war camp after the bitterly brief fight for France in the summer of 1940. André becomes a spy and saboteur for the British and Free French while working undercover as translator and liaison with the German high command at the Brittany headquarters of the French National Railroads. Summoned by the British, he clandestinely crosses the Channel for initiation and training as an MI6 agent in England. His network betrayed during his absence, he is arrested on his return to France. André then begins an even more perilous journey through interrogations in Gestapo prisons and the little-known Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, before being transferred to Dachau and Allach, ahead of the advancing Allies. Many vintage photographs and letters from his agents come to illustrate this heart-pounding story of a debonair young man in a broken world who remade himself as a cunning fighter for freedom.
