World War II has to come to the end of living memory. Its remaining witnesses were no more than children at the end of the conflict. In a few years they will be gone, leaving the war and its profound trials as part of archival memory, rather than the visceral experience of people among us.

		"SUITE FRANCAISE" By Irene Nemirovsky Knopf ($25)

The narratives of World War II, beginning with soldiers' stories such as Norman Mailer's or Joseph Heller's and ending with the uncertain memories of children trapped in the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel or Jerzy Kosinski, have provided us with a rich narrative retelling of the upheavals of the mid-20th century.

Ir?ne Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise," which might be the last great fiction of the war, provides us with an intimate recounting of occupation, exodus and loss. It concludes the elegy for a time that will soon be passed.

The book, modeled after Johann Sebastian Bach's "French Suites," was to have been an epic -- a novel in five parts. The first two are presented here along with the author's notes for the rest of the uncompleted project, though the author's own story might act as a coda to their stories.

Nemirovsky was born in 1903 in Kiev, Russia, to wealthy Jewish parents who were driven out of their homeland, finally reaching France, where she became one of the most celebrated and respected authors of her time.

Then the war.

Nemirovsky, her husband and their two daughters fled Paris, finding refuge in an occupied provincial village. While her literary prestige did little to shield her from either the petty insults or gross indecencies of anti-Semitism, she continued to write, filling large leather-bound notebooks in minuscule script to save paper.

She sensed the hopelessness of the situation and her country's inability -- or refusal -- to save her.

In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Two months later, the Nazis killed her husband and his siblings. The policeman who arrested their father advised Nemirovsky's daughters to flee. They spent the rest of the war in hiding, keeping their mother's notebooks safe for what they hoped would be her return.

Finding them too painful to read, the daughters would not open their mother's writings for decades. Sixty years later, Ir?ne Nemirovsky's pair of transcendent novels have finally been published.

The first, "Storm in June," works as an overture, introducing characters representing diverse social classes as the Nazis descend on Paris. Within the week most Parisians had abandoned their city.

As she is contemplating how to structure the five novels, Nemirovsky notes to herself that, "The most important and most interesting thing here is the following: the historical, revolutionary facts must be only lightly touched upon, while the daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail."

The individual struggle to leave or surrender as France is falling to its knees, presented previously as a historical fact, is brought into the sharp focus of individual actions and thought in these astonishing scenes.

When an elderly couple lose track of their son, for example, and decide to return to Paris, the first person they run into is the hairdresser who works on their street. They beg her to tell them what to do next. She offers the only advice she can:

"I'd start by having your hair washed. It will clear your mind."

"Dolce," the second novel, is set in an occupied village. It centers around the quotidian exchanges that occur between the German officers and the French women who have been left behind by their men. Here, Nemirovsky starts to weave the cause and effect of these wartime connections and it's clear how she meant for these characters to return in future narratives.

The novel ends with the Nazi soldiers leaving the village when Germany invades Russia. They are off to fight a new war. For the villagers, there is a ray of hope.

The staggering power of "Suite Francaise" is that it affirms the idea that art can offer a path to salvation, a formulation that I've previously kept as a hollow adage or cliche. These novels prove otherwise.

In the end art might be the only thing worth saving, for it is here where our humanity is given form, celebrated and reaffirmed.

In spite of collective action, we are each ultimately shaped by our desires, dreams, hopes and intellect and our ability to hold these dear.

This might be the most moving novel I will ever read. It is not only a book about occupied France but also a testament to the role art can play in the most unendurable of circumstances.

Like Anne Frank, Ir?ne Nemirovsky was unaware of neither her circumstance nor the growing probability that she might not survive. And still, she writes to us.