April 15, 2003
THE
SECOND WORLD WAR B
LIVING IN THE HEARTS
OF A FAMILY OF SURVIVORS
Francoise Hall, Editor
Copyright 2005, Francoise Hall, all rights reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION B WARS LIVE ON
SECTION ONE B THE PARENTS WRITE THEIR MEMORIES
MOTHER B Marguerite Wyedemans Puvrez
Document 1: Letter to her Sister............................................................................. 4
Document 2: AA Baby Girl@................................................................................... 7
Document 3: AThe Puvrez Family@...................................................................... 13
FATHER B Paul Auguste Puvrez
AUntil Four O=clock in the Morning.................................................................... 14
SECTION TWO B THE CHILDREN WRITE THEIR MEMORIES
THE FIRST CHILD B Marie-Genevieve Puvrez Stegen Lane
AGrowing up in Belgium during the Last World War@........................................ 18
THE SECOND CHILD B Marguerite Puvrez Harris
AMy Growing-up Years in World War II@........................................................... 24
THE THIRD CHILD B Marie-Francoise Puvrez Hall
Document 1: AFragments of a War B As imprinted on the Mind of a Child@..... 28
Document 2: ADear Tefel@................................................................................... 41
Document 3: Childhood Scream B Stop the Killing!............................................ 43
Document 4: War Poems....................................................................................... 47
Little Girl in Your Cellar........................................................................... 48
The Plight................................................................................................... 49
On the Anniversary of World War II in Belgium...................................... 50
Bombardment Revisited............................................................................ 51
I killed Her................................................................................................. 52
Me and the War......................................................................................... 54
I am the War.............................................................................................. 55
To Miriam.................................................................................................. 57
A Sea of Dead........................................................................................... 59
Food and Punishment................................................................................ 61
Mise-en-Scene: World War II.................................................................... 63
In the Cellar............................................................................................... 64
The War B Now Inside.............................................................................. 66
Indictment of My Ancestors..................................................................... 68
1940, 2003................................................................................................. 69
The Cellar-School...................................................................................... 70
War.... 72
AAfter the War@........................................................................................ 74
A Child=s World Destroyed..................................................................... 76
REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION B WARS LIVE ON
When countries silence their guns and start preparing for their next war, the war which they think is over, is indeed far from finished. It lives on in the heart of its survivors as a poisonous serpent penetrating all aspects of their shattered lives. In whatever way they cope, survivors must somehow, in some fashion, deal with the trauma they have just endured. To ignore it, means to continuously keep it at bay so it can be avoided. To encapsulate it, like a purulent abscess, means that its borders must be constantly guarded and reinforced, so that the pus will not leak out. To deny it, means to acknowledge the trauma sufficiently to know what it is that has to be blocked out from memory.
Some survivors aim to Anot dwell on it,@ Aleave it behind,@ Aget over it,@ Amove on@ and lead a Anormal@ life. Others aim to accumulate power so as to avoid ever again the resurgence of those painful feelings of helpless vulnerability B Ait won=t ever happen again to me or my own.@ Still others fear giving up the moral high ground of the innocent victim. They prefer to see the world in black and white, executioners and victims, rather than acknowledge the frequent (though not invariable) hazy and dynamic boundary between these two categories. In whatever way survivors cope, and there are myriads, all have to come to terms with the fact that they have seen, touched and smelled people willingly B and often with enthusiasm and self-righteousness B hurt, main and kill each other.
This trauma of seeing human beings intentionally murder each other en masse, cannot be erased from the mind, no matter how much one might wish to do. The betrayal of commonality is too great, the breach of trust too devastating, the repudiation of humanistic values too abhorrent.
Though bombs have ceased to fall, the venom within remains, pervades and stays on. Thus it was for the five of us, my parents and us three children, who lived through those nightmare years of the Second World War, 1940-45, in Liege, Belgium, 25 miles from the German border. We all had Asatisfactory lives@ afterwards. Our parents continued their career, father as an aeronautical engineer and mother as a teacher of romance languages, then as a social worker. The three of us became physicians. Genevieve, the eldest, practiced general medicine and both Marguerite and I specialized in psychiatry. In addition, I also specialized in preventive medicine and public health. Yet the war affected all of our lives deeply, sometimes in obvious ways, such as the three of us going into the healing profession, and sometimes in subtle ways, such as, for instance, noticing a deep, gnawing awareness of fearing putting trust in others.
I present here the Second World War as we remember it B each one of the five of us telling his or her own story. Our accounts are those of lucky ones. We all escaped, rather miraculously, without physical, bodily harm. Our trauma was Aonly@ emotional and mental. I invite you relive the War, as we lived it during in those years from hell.
Francoise Hall
April 19, 2003
SECTION ONE B THE PARENTS WRITE THEIR MEMORIES
MOTHER
B
Marguerite Wyedemans Puvrez (1903-92)
Document
1: Letter to her Sister
Mother,
Marguerite, was born on 11 August, 1903, hence, was 37-42 during the war years
(1940-45). She wrote the following
letter to her sister, Nany, on 2 June 1940, twenty-three days into the invasion
of Belgium which took place on 10 May 1940.
She was 37 years old at the time.
(The translation from French is mine)
Sunday Morning, 2 June 1940
My Very Dear Nany,
To tell you all that has happened since this famous last and beautiful Sunday, is almost impossible. We are all alive at the present moment, and that is the principal. I am so happy to have received your long letter this morning. It went to Bendant Street, in Paris. The day after my arrival in Paris, I wrote you, addressing it to the Belgian Consul in Toulouse, as you had recommended that I do. I even wrote a card so that it would be easier for the censure. That card, apparently, you didn=t receive.
Here we are so close to one another B you in Albi and myself in Montauban! Who would have predicted it! I am so happy that you are settled, and with your husband. I myself, am still like a bird on the branch, and I don=t have Paul (her husband, our father) near me.
I am going to try to tell you in a few words. We left Brussels by taxi, arrived in Tournai around 8 p.m. Attempted to find lodging. Night falls, still no lodging. A workman offers us his bed. We accept. Around 10 a.m., the next day, we head toward the station to try to find a train. Mid-way, an alert. The bombs fall very near the station. Paul gives up on the railroad. A taxi to Blandain. The border is closed until further orders (It turns out that at 12:30 p.m., it was re-opened, but we had already gone!).
Taxi to Furnes. Lodging at the Bieswal aunts (sisters of Ignace Bieswal, her step-father). They were very nice. The next morning, we rent an apartment in La Panne (crowded, crowded!) belonging to the parents-in-law of Frans Timmermans!! (Frans Timmermans was a childhood friend of our mother). I shop for food!! We meet the Bosman (friends of my parents) from Liege! At night: alerts (many)!
The next day, Paul informs himself and realizes that there is a queue 10 Km long, of cars almost touching each other, waiting for the opening of the border at Guivelde. Pedestrians and cyclists can go through. We buy five used bicycles (without luggage racks!) and, loaded like donkeys, we ride from 12 noon to 5 p.m. when we arrive in Dunkerque. At 5:30 p.m., we leave for Paris.
The next day, we go to Chateaudun Street where they give me your address, care of the Consul, in Toulouse. That same day, I wrote you a card which apparently didn=t reach you, giving you our address on Bendant Street.
Paul finds work immediately at Issy-les Moulineaux. A few days later: rationing of bread. They refuse to give them to Belgians B Paris can be a stop-over only. We have to leave. In any case, alerts, and the children cannot stand them anymore (in the taxis and trains, they were vomiting from them! At night, they had nervous shakes!). So, here we are, separated. The children and I leave for Montauban, where, apparently, there was a lot of room for Belgians! Error!! We found a living room transformed in bedroom in the house of a neurotic woman, luckily very clean, but who cannot stand children, and we eat in the house across the street, where three persons, fairly well-to-do, share the costs of living. We divide the cost in seven and I pay 4/7. I help them, of course. It=s all right as a temporary arrangement.
And now, as of a few days ago, Paul is told to move and sent to St. Etienne (Loire). The last news is that I am going to join him. Since he expects to be mobilized sooner than expected, due to that horrible day the King betrayed us (a King whom I don=t ever want to hale again for anything in the world), I hope that we can have some time together until then. In any case, they say that there is a fair number of Belgian workers there. My hope is, therefore, to enroll the children in school there. My hope comes perhaps because of the fact that I wrote the Ministry of Public Education at Poitiers and made myself fully available to them. I could, therefore, from one moment to the next, be sent in a camp for refugees to teach. And I must accept because I will have to live with my children, if Paul is mobilized.
You see that for us, nothing is settled yet. That is why I say that you are lucky to be there, with your husband.
How happy I am that Paulette (her sister=s adopted daughter, a year old) tolerated your entire odyssey! You also saw some!! At her age, one is more insouciant than at the age of mine!
Again, I am happy for you. You understand that I think also frequently about mother. How lonely she must feel!! In all honesty, if she had come with us, I wonder how she would have done the La Panne-Dunkerque stretch. We had to leave the Bosman because they had their parents with them. I wonder what has happened to them.
It seems that physically, mother will not suffer too much. I hope so and I wish it so with all my heart. Brussels must be calm now. Also, they didn=t destroy too much. But mentally, poor mother! What is one to do? We had to do what we did. I think that we were right B and we had to do it so quickly!! Events have proved it!
My dear Nany, I have to go prepare supper across the street. Write me here for now B no, better at Paul=s work: Usines La Chaleassiere, St. Etienne (Loire). There, it will surely arrive. I am so glad about your news and to know that you are well. I think that I won=t be able to go and see you because I could be leaving here as early as to-morrow. I send you my good kisses. My respects to Madame Becquet (her sister=s mother-in-law). I kiss Georges (her sister=s husband) and I adore little Paulette. My children hug her tightly in their arms!
Document
2: AA Baby
Girl@
Mother wrote the following in 1972, at my request, as part of a 29-page document, entitled, AA Baby Girl,@ describing her own life history. She was 69 years old at the time of writing.
1936-1940
Hitler came to power by and by. Pieces of Europe fell into his hands bit by bit. What was Fascism? That=s all people were talking about. Nany, my sister, married around 1933 B an active young lawyer. Georges Becquet was his name. He belonged to a new, young political party called REX B in fact, the Fascism branch in Belgium. Family gatherings were poisoned by vehement discussions about Fascism. Paul (her husband, our father) and Georges would argue for hours until mother would ask everyone of us to leave. She could not stand it any longer...
Coming back to the thirties and these politically poisoned years, suitcases were packed and ready on chairs in our dining-room for years. We all knew the Germans would one day invade Belgium, and Liege is the first city near Germany. Since Paul was Reserve Officer, he would have to join his Unit, and I would go to Brussels with the babies. Nineteen-thirty nine came, Chamberlain went to Germany, with his umbrella, to hold talks with Hitler and we felt a little period of rest, Aa rest before the storm.@
Paul had had four of his older brothers in the war of 1914-18. They had all come back but one had remained very sick, if not crippled. Paul had heard of the four-year separation from their wives and he had me promise to follow him at all costs. So, there were the plans, when one day, he came back with an advertisement about a cruise in the Mediterranean Sea with visits in Italy, Sicily, Greece, Rhodes, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt B on a German ship, The Milwaukee. A one-month cruise! We had a little money aside, not much, but Paul counted on my mother who by that time was very well off (she had a large share in the Chocolaterie Cote d=Or which belonged to the Bieswal=s and Michaels=) and he decided we would take that cruise. We had just come back from the seaside (July), so we drove the children to Wenduyne, and put them in a small pension, under the supervision of a young couple, just married, to whom we offered their holidays and a salary. The cruise was heavenly. No time to talk much between the both of us because of the very heavy schedule. I had a heavenly time.
World War II
One bright, sunny early morning in May 1940, bombs exploded everywhere around the house, window-panes flew all over the rooms, the children stampeded hurriedly downstairs and crept in our bed. The war was on. I jumped out of bed and ordered, AIn the bathtub. Quickly! I=ll wash you!@ (Why? Up to this day I wonder why!). In the bathtub, pushing the pieces of glass aside, I washed my three children before running with them to the station for a train to Brussels (our car had been requisitioned by the Army).
We waited and waited in the crowds until finally we could push our way in a wagon. We were almost sitting on one another. The train moved slowly. About half way between Liege and Brussels, huge planes came down, zooming around the train, bombs exploded in the fields, and machine gun bullets flew in our compartment. I looked around: no children. I called their names: no answer. The noise was tremendous. I felt something under my feet. The children were under the seats. I ducked too, and the train moved on, despite the wounded and the many cows in the field that had been blown open by the bombs.
We arrived at my mother=s. Sometimes later, Paul arrived. He had not found his Unit and, in Brussels, had been told, AEach man for himself! You must report in Paris.@ Impossible to go from Brussels to Paris. The lines were cut, the Germans had advanced to somewhere half-way between Brussels and Paris.
We took a train to the coast B La Panne (south of Belgium, on the coast). We bought five bicycles, we left our suitcases but we put five or six dresses on ourselves and attached a parcel on each bike. We went past the dunes on the wet sand and started to ride towards France. We arrived in Calais exhausted. A train took us to Paris where we rented two little rooms on a fifth floor (no elevator). We lived in those rooms for I do not remember how long. Paul was always trying to find the French Unit or Plant where his Unit was sent. He finally came back one day, saying that he was sent to St. Etienne, on the Rhone, and I was not supposed to go with him. The Arefugees@ from the Liege region had to go to Montauban, much more to the south of France.
So that is where I landed with my three little girls and very little baggage. I had my jewels and a little money. By that time, my hips would hardly carry me and I was in continuous pain.
In Montauban, a very fine, old, little southern French town, the memory of which I hate, I could not find a bedroom. I pleaded from door to door for a bed, with my three little girls. Finally, in the outskirts, an old lady gave me a room (gave... for good money) but every day I had to report to the Town hall to give my excuse for not joining the crowds of Belgian and Eastern France refugees who were being re-located in big camps somewhere in France. I had promised to follow Paul so I wanted to go where he was working, to that munition Plant, on the Rhone.
And every day, I had to walk that long way, to and from the Town Hall, dragging myself along the walls, supporting myself on the low window sills and the outside shutters of rows and rows of low little houses. Every day I had to beg the children to stay in bed, because I was pretending at the Town Hall that they were very sick.
We had so few clothes that I had to wash, and the old landlady yelled at me because the drying would dampen her house, and also because the children had opened a shutter to look at the sun and the sun would harm her furniture.
One day, I came home in the afternoon to see the landlady waiting for me. She was furious. She had found the girls in the garden, in their nighties, fighting, i.e. playing duel against neighboring boys, using long grass stems as swords. That was the end, and my possessions were on the street.
So, I started walking with the children, but I knew I would not find another room. I asked a neighboring kind of farm house to keep the children for a while and I went on my search. I heard someone yelling after me. I had to go back. There on the street, were the children and my little possessions. The girls had found nothing better than to open the door of the chicken pen and have fun running all the hens away.
That was the end. I remember yelling at the children, pushing them in the street. There was a space with no houses and I said to them, ALook, I have to go to the Town Hall and ask for a bed.@ (The night was coming). AYou stay here and you do not move!@ and I put them on the side of the road with their feet in a small ditch (no water), sitting on the grass, and I repeated again, yelling, ADo not move!@ I saw Francoise crying softly, with big tears, and saying quietly, AAnts are coming in my pants! They are eating me!@ and I heard myself answer, AI don=t care! Don=t move!@ Poor little one!
By that time, they probably sympathized with me at the Town Hall, or they saw I was really stubborn, and they arranged my passage to where Paul was working.
There (in St. Etienne), we had one room for the five of us. Paul reported for work every day. After a couple of days or weeks, one night, he came back, we ate, we put the children to bed, and he said, AWe have to make a decision. If we stay here, the Germans will take us, because France is giving up. If I move from here, I am labeled a deserter but we could go to the Spanish border, cross the Pyrenees Mountains one way or another, go to Portugal, and then to England or Canada, or the States, anywhere.@
We talked it over and over the whole night and at sunrise, we packed our few things, woke up the children, and went out to sell all my jewelry. With all our money left, we bought a car and away we went.
We were crossing a flat country side, with fields of wheat on both sides when a group of French soldiers came out of the high grass or high wheat. AGive us your car...@ And they gave us a small requisition paper, signed. And that was that. We all sat in the wheat. We could not talk anymore, and it was hot... hot. We had nothing left.
Paul said, AStay here, I=ll walk.@ And he walked until he learned that we were not too, too far from Vichy. The Ashadow@ Belgian Government B the part of the Government which had refused to submit to King Leopold=s capitulation to Hitler B was in Vichy.
Vichy took orders from England. The orders from England came for Paul to return to Liege and be in communication to inform England about movements of troops and centers of ammunition. That is what Paul did during the war through members of the Resistance of whom he knew only one (in case of imprisonment and torture). So back we went by train, in an old, dirty train. The children were rather happy to go back to their old school.
Life in Liege during the War
When we came back to Liege after all our travels as refugees, I was appointed in Herstal High School to teach Flemish to coeds from ages 14-19 years, and English to beginners. I was happy riding morning and night on my blue bike along the Meuse. Life became a routine B smuggling some eggs, a little butter, some meat, wheat, etc...
Nineteen forty one became very hard for food. Restrictions were tight. There was no food whatsoever. We did not know what to eat. I had a few potatoes left in the cellar. One day I cleaned them, i.e. took the sprouts off, and I was not going to throw away that good food. So I added these sprouts to a big pot of red cabbage. The girls said they could not eat it. I couldn=t either. Paul pinched his nose and said, AI=m too hungry!@ and he ate up his plate. I sent the girls to bed saying, AGo to sleep, you will not feel you are hungry when you sleep.@ A few minutes later, Paul came up from the bathroom. He was livid. He said, AIt=s all gone, let=s go to bed!@ The next day one of the girls came back from school saying, AMother, you almost poisoned us last night. Potato sprouts contain a strong poison!@
We had made a provision of cans and cans but also a few large pieces of bacon. I put them hanging to dry in the attic. One day, I went up and my bacon was Arunning@ with little white worms. I thought, AI=m not going to waste that good food. Worms are meat. So I brought it down and cut it in small pieces. I cooked it for hours and hours, to make sure the worms would not be living anymore, and while my large container of fat was boiling (I was probably nervous as I was stirring it), I splashed boiling fat on my leg B on the front of my leg. I called the doctor. I could see the bone in places. The doctor said, AI can treat it kindly for you, and it will take weeks and weeks to heal, or I can give you a way to treat it that will hurt awfully but you can continue your teaching and all activities.@ Of course, that was my choice and he gave me a large bottle of mercurochrome. I had to put it on every few minutes at first, then every hour, etc... until it would form a heavy crust on the burnt holes. I functioned... but did it ever hurt when I would get up in the morning!!
Late summer 1941, we decided to buy farm land in the country, not too far from Liege. We said to the farmer, ADo not give us any interest, just give us some food from your family once in a while.@ So we used to go out on Sundays, on our five bikes, to get some eggs or butter. Francoise on her small bike would not smuggle anything but would ride in front and start singing if she saw German soldiers, so that we would have time to turn left or right and hide. One day, Francoise found a revolver. We hid it for a while in the coal in the cellar, then we sent Francoise with the revolver in her bag, on her little bike to take the revolver to Mr. Bosman whose son was in the active resistance. She did it very well, smiling at the guards on the bridge.
Canadian and American soldiers would escape from German prison camps and land in Liege. What to do with them? I was in an organization that tried to hide them until a contact was found to have them picked up by plane at night. The boys in school helped me very much. They would convince their parents to agree to hide a soldier for a few days. This was a dangerous business. If caught, the soldier would just be sent back to Germany, but the Belgians involved would, of course, have been shot. I had a girl friend who was tortured. We knew only one name to contact in the organization, in case!
A young chap, just married, was caught and tortured. I knew his wife. She had just had a baby. I promised to raise her baby if she and her husband were shot. He was weak and gave names when the Germans were going to emasculate him (he had been able to take the pulling of nails, etc...). From then on, his wife could visit him but she always went with her baby in her arms for fear of being killed by another member of the organization as revenge. After the war, they had to leave for the Belgian Congo, or they would have been killed by Belgians. War is awful.
So, life went on, and sometime in 1943, I did not have my menstruation.... (plans suicide. Has an illegal induced abortion)
After all, the war years were not so bad. We did not have time to talk, Paul and I, of anything else but the immediate and concrete things. On week-ends, we would go camping on our bikes. At home, there was a rope attached on the heating system for Paul to escape, in case; and our false identity cards were hidden under a corner of the carpet in the dining room.
The end of the war came. Our organizations were dismantled. We were told to go in hiding. We went far south in Belgium in a lost country, in one room with two large beds. It was awful but it did not last. We went to Chaudfontaine, nearer to Liege and... for several nights we gave water to the exhausted German soldiers walking back to Germany in two rows, one on each side of the highway. The officers would hit them when they saw them drinking our water.
And one day, there was a big tank and a couple of smiling faces popping out of the turret. I ran downstairs where we had a few cigarettes hidden and ran on the road to give them to the soldiers in their tank. They laughed and threw several packages to us. We smiled back. We sang. We shouted, AThank you! Thank you!@ They smiled and went on. I think they were Canadians but it made no difference, they were Aour@ saviors.
We were bombed out of our house in Liege (half of it collapsed and it was declared unsafe, the piano kind of hanging in the air). The main thing was, we were unharmed in the cellar and could come out.
We moved to Brussels. The festivities after the war were indescribable. No movie could reproduce the dancing, singing, crying and hugging in the streets for days and nights.
During one of these popular dances, on the Grande Place de Bruxelles, I took the hand of an English soldier and we sang and danced in rows together. He liked us. We liked him. I asked him if he could stay with us until next morning. He said, yes, because he had to report for work at the air field only the next morning. He stayed with us for one whole year. His name is Nobby Mahoney, a most wonderful young man. He called me mother. He played with the girls, teasing them, breaking windows, fighting, singing, etc... A real big brother for them. He is a grandfather now but still writes to me, ADear Mother,@ some 5-6 times a year.
Document
3: AThe
Puvrez Family@
Mother wrote the following in 1972, at my request, as part of a 46-page document, entitled, AThe Puvrez Family,@ describing our growing up years. She was 69 years old at the time of writing.
The War
If war Agets the worst out of people,@ it also gets the best. Because in life, everything is relative and the war is so horrible, threatening, frightening that our little problems seem little and we bear them better. One speaks less of oneself. There are so many big happenings outside of us that life continues like a routine. One is glad to be alive every day. There are bombardments, flights to the cellar, classes given in bunkers underneath the school, and the joy of finding the five of us sitting around the table in the evening. If one hears a bomb explode, that=s good. It means that it is for the neighbor and not for oneself. And one lives. One exists. That=s all. No holidays or very little. My mother rents a big house in Tervuren where the family spends the summer. It is there that I wrote my little APrins Kalaf,@ and that I directed plays where Francoise always had the leading role. Why? ...
FATHER B Paul Auguste Puvrez (1903-85)
AUntil Four O=clock in the Morning@
Father, Paul, was born on 17 January, 1903, hence, was 37-42 during the war years (1940-45). He wrote the following in 1972, at my request, as part of a 16-page document entitled, AUntil Four O=clock in the Morning,@ describing our growing up years. He was 69 years old at the time of writing. (The translation from French is mine).
The Second World War
My pacifism never consisted of a complete condemnation of the belligerents with a refusal to serve under any condition. Hitler=s tyranny is such an abominable thing and those who support him are so powerful that it is necessary to take seriously the idea of victory of the fascist dictator. It seems to me that it must be fought at all costs. This was the opinion of Einstein when he was advising the young Belgians to renounce conscientious objection. I, who had hated the Army, was ready to be mobilized as soon as Belgium was implicated.
One had to consider seriously the possibility of a situation developing analogous to that of 1914, that is to say, a sudden invasion of Belgium. And in 1914, it had been better to flee to France than stay under the occupation. From September 1939 onward, the invasion could take place at any time. We, therefore, maintained ourselves ready. For this, the mother and the three children packed their suitcases and these were placed in the dining room. In this way, they could take the first train to Brussels where Grandmother Bieswal (our mother=s mother) was ready to receive them. I myself would stay in Liege in order to wait for my order to join the army, if it had not come yet.
This predicted scene took place on 10 May, 1940. The train to Brussels (carrying mother and us three children) did reach its destination despite the bombs which were dropped on it. My order to join said simply to stay home until the arrival of detailed instructions which were in preparation. The next day, by order of the military authority, I was myself trying to go to Brussels but the train stopped, destroyed mid-way by the bombardments. I was nevertheless able to reach Brussels that day. But we were not secure in Brussels and all together this time, we departed for La Panne, Dunkerque, and Paris. In Paris, I made myself available to the French Government since the Belgian Army had not employed me. They put me to work at the Simca factories with a team of Belgian draftsmen. It only lasted a few weeks. First, we could see for ourselves that the front was approaching and we decided that the children and their mother would go South, to Montauban. And then, it was me and my team that the authorities were evacuating to the rear, relocating us in St. Etienne (Loire). There was not much reason to stay in Montauban and so the five of us were reunited in St-Etienne. This was for a few weeks only because events were moving fast and we wanted to continue to avoid a war under enemy occupation. But when we thought we would be able to reach Bordeaux and take a boat to England, the United States or Canada, it was too late. Our train was stopped for 36 hours and then disembarked its human cargo in the village of Magnet, in the Allier, not too far from Vichy. There, we were lodged very kindly in a school with other refugees. It is there that, in the calm of the countryside, we learned of the defeat. The occupation of the whole Atlantic coast closed all hope of escaping. We then followed the instructions of the Belgian Government B return and try to resume life as normally as possible under the occupation.
The return trip again had a few adventures but these were now secondary. Many railroad lines were still cut and it was not easy to know which was the best train to take or how one would proceed after it stopped.
Finally we were again in Liege, at home, in an apartment which had not changed. We were under the occupation but we soon took our respective roads to the Cockerill Factories (his work), Herstal High School (our mother=s work) and the School of the Boulevard d=Avroy (our school).
The Occupation
For several months at the beginning of the occupation, what was hardest to bear was the power of the fascists and the general discouragement. Where France had fallen, England would not resist. And neither Russia nor the United States would intervene just for our own good pleasure. No question of resistance B people would take you for an idiot who had not understood anything.
The first change of any importance was the campaign in Russia, in June 1941. On the very day of the attack, many of our friends, such as Jules Bosman, were awakened at 5 a.m. and put in concentration camps. From then on, this type of arrest became more and more common. And the news was alarming. The Germans were making big advances in Russia and the Western Allies were not doing anything to assist the Russian Army, such as opening a second front, for instance.
In 1942, things started to be better, with Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Pearl Harbor. But it was far from finished. The problem of food was becoming more and more distressing. Rations did not arrive. We bicycled to the country to buy a few things country-people had hidden.
It is in 1943 that the resistance really began. We worked for the clandestine press, and then helped those who rebelled against the Work Service B the Germans were taking Belgian workers to work in German war factories, where, of course, they were victims of the Allied bombing. For the children, all of this hardly existed. Genevieve is the only one who helped, carrying secret messages in the bag of her bicycle. We spent the summers in Tervuren, at the house of Grandmother Bieswal (mother=s mother), and we swam in the Beau Soleil (an open-air swimming pool in Tervuren).
The Liberation
In 1944, things stiffened. Allied bombing of German cities became frequent and massive. The Germans had a strong DCA (anti-aircraft cannons, five doors from our house) and the order was to go to the cellar. More and more frequently, the targets of allied bombs were objectives in Belgium B bridges, railway depots, etc... And with the impreciseness of the shooting, there were civilian casualties every time. The Germans were becoming more and more nervous because the resistance was becoming stronger and more enthusiastic. I was no exception.
One day, on my way to work, I was engulfed underneath a house which collapsed on me. This was at the same time that one of my friends, hit by a bomb during the same bombardment, was losing his life.
The Allies, after having disembarked in Normandy, were progressing. The Resistance had to organize the sabotage of the destruction of the art work undertaken by the fleeing Germans. Certain days, the bombardments were so bad that it seemed to us we would survive only by miracle. It was then that we finished our stock of wine in the cellar. Toward the summer of 1944, the trip from the house to the factory became very dangerous and the house became very dangerous also because many of my friends were being arrested. We tried to put the children in Renardmont (near Stavelot, 50 Km to the south-east of Liege), at the Bosman=s and ourselves stay in a hotel. But the children still needed too much attention and we rented a small house in Chaudfontaine (20 Km to the south-west of Liege). From there, I was able to get to town quickly for the work of the Resistance and it would have needed the German Gestapo quite a bit of time to locate me.
At the time that Liege was taken over by Americans, I was in the City and the others were in Chaudfontaine. I was glad of this because there could have been street fights in our section of the City as well as in others.
Immediately after the liberation, the Resistance undertook to hunt the Aunpatriotic@ (as we called those who had collaborated) and this kept me in town. But we were well in Chaudfontaine and I would come back in the evening. We would invite new friends B the American soldiers.
The University of Brussels soon re-opened its doors, closed by the Germans from the time of the beginning of the occupation. I was offered a teaching position. This meant many trips from Liege to Brussels and vis-versa, even though the trip was very difficult. One of the reasons for this difficulty, was that the Germans at this time subjected Liege to an intensive attack of V-1's. This was in preparation for their counter-offensive of December 1944, called AThe Battle of Bulge.@ Another reason was that the Americans knew little about the Belgian railway network and were producing more traffic jams than transport.
About the V-1's, Genevieve had found that in between the time the motor stopped and the detonation, one had just the time to say AMerde! Voila qu=elle s=arrete!@ (Shit, it just stopped!). We lost a lot in those bombardments of Liege. Our house became just one big ruin, without windows, without doors, the cupboards knocked in, etc... What was left of what could be carried, was put in Brussels and we moved there in January 1945.
We had an apartment in a house on the Avenue des Hortensias which had just been re-named Avenue du General Eisenhower. The children enrolled in the Ixelles High School and the mother obtained a position in one of the public schools. The food problem had improved considerably since the Liberation. But in Brussels, coal was scarce and consequently gas was, since all the gas came from coal. We were cold that winter.
The war ended in Europe in 1945. We were in town to celebrate that event. And there, we met a British solider. He was called Nobby. We brought him home and he lived with us many months as a member of the family.
SECTION TWO B THE CHILDREN WRITE THEIR MEMORIES
THE
FIRST CHILD B
Marie-Genevieve Puvrez Stegen Lane (1929-)
AGrowing up in Belgium during the Last
World War@
Genevieve
was born on 11 October, 1929, hence, was 10-15 during the war years
(1940-45). She wrote the following
outline for a speech she gave to the British Legion, London, England, in March
2002. She was 72 years old at the time.
Thank you for the Introduction
What I will cover
Setting the Scene
Experience as a Refugee
Back to Everyday Life
The Resistance
School life
Holidays
Birthdays
Towards the End of the Occupation
The German Retreat and the Liberation
At the End of the War
The Legacy of the War
Setting the Scene
Family of three children close together in age, living in Liege, 30 Km from the German border. During the Aphony@ war which started on 3 Sept 1939, parents were aware of the imminence of an invasion... suitcases in the dining room... We were told what to do if we had to flee.
Refugees
Invasion in May 1940... Father reports to the authorities... train to Brussels... bombing... family re-union... Father joins us, having been told to go... no recruitment, all the papers where being destroyed... his duty was not to get taken prisoner... He leaves separately... We leave for the coast, to near Ostende... see British soldiers in trucks going the other way... V- sign as we bicycle towards France (can=t remember where)... bicycles sold... train to Grenoble... report at a refugee center... assigned to the flat of an old spinster, ADo not wash their hair@... It was here that mother suggested I should help to sort out clothes in a refugee center. Father tries again to join up... no luck... told not to be taken prisoner and to go the UK... Family to Bordeaux. Father with us then... to a refugee center... assigned to the home of a couple... sleep in the conservatory (fight with long grass... let the chickens out of the pen, etc...) Mother has to find us somewhere else to go!! Father tries to get information about getting on a boat. The Petain Government overtakes Bordeaux... Announcement to go back home. Train back.
Back to Everyday Life
Making the contact as it was B German occupation conciliatory. They soon worked out not to trust what they were told by the population, i.e., asking the way. They walked in the opposite direction from what they were told. Crowded streetcars and the Walloon market woman. The morale was kept up with stories about Hitler. Can=t remember them but they often contained a dog called Fuhrer. Electricity and the seams of clothes... rationing of food and clothes, shortage of food, bread rolled up in sawdust. Food was never used by children as play material. Coffee was made with roasted lupins seeds. There were very few cats and dogs about. Toilet paper was cut pieces of newspaper. School started again. Mother continues her studies to become a teacher and father is back at work. Rounding up of Jews. My best school friend was a Jew called Miriam... When the Jews were rounded up, her brothers to lady opposite, then to an orphanage... parents taken away... Miriam made to follow the troops... Germans requisitioned houses everywhere... lovely classical music out of the opened windows. We children were fitted out with leather labels printed with our names and dates of birth... trains were running... we could make the occasional visits to Brussels. Visit to my maternal grandmother and my other grandmother... Radio marching songs... Hitler=s rallies. Organization of the Resistance. Curfew... Black out (if there was a chink of light showing, passing soldiers would shoot at the window...) Noises of someone running in the street sometimes followed by shooting. There were power cuts. Heating during the winter consisted of a little stove in our bedroom. There was ice on the window!! Shortage of food. Trips on bicycles to a farm... brought back potatoes to keep potato shoots... Storage of dried beans. Money, specially foreign currency, not allowed. Parents thatched a few English pounds in a glass jar in the coal storage. I was told where it was and shown it so I could use it, should both of my parents be arrested or we became separated from them... The Germans often stopped trains and streetcars to check on the identity of everyone and often to look for someone. Apparently they recognized that a couple of nuns were in fact disguised Resistance men by throwing something on their laps... Also, a German General was recognized by the Resistance because of his habit to break his bread into crumbs at the table!
Mother had a painful hip. My parents had great anxiety regarding the inheritance of whatever was the cause of it. They took us to an orthopaedic specialist. I remember being taken to Brest which was the place for problems of this sort and where there were bedridden people. I was taken to a doctor there. He examined me and made me walk up and down naked... He concluded that the chances of me having the same problem as our mother was very small but he advised that my left hip (which was the side on which my mother had the worst problem) should be rested in order to allow the head of the femur to grow properly. He said that I should sleep in a half cast of Paris with my leg rotated outward. I did this dutifully for several years. When I had outgrown the cast or when it had become too soft and was falling apart, it was replaced B by one of my uncles who was a sculptor and who had my old mold. I remember that it was on such an occasion that my parents thought it a good idea to hide some money within the cast. I knew it was there but I doubt whether either of my sister did...
The Resistance
Father in a cell. Articles for an underground newspaper based on translations of the BBC radio... how he listened to the radio announcements... We three! Rope by the radiator. Illegal activity. Also other things B he had to go out at night... did not involve my sisters but did involve me. Made a promise not to ask me to carry fire arms. I carried things usually on my bicycle, delivered messages to addresses. Once I delivered a parcel B I did not ask about it (never did query...). It was a revolver. Father was upset at having done it and much later in life, told me and said how very sorry he was.
A man from the cell was taken prisoner and tortured to the point of revealing the names of others. Was promised a visit from his wife and young baby. Did give away some names. Mother offered to take in the baby but the wife said no because she knew that she might be shot by the others of the cell. There was less chance of this if she had a baby in her arms. My father=s name was almost certainly given. Told to move. Left everything and went to the Ardennes on a farm. School interrupted.
We had a couple of cousins who were in the Resistance... Arrested... tortured... made to march... eventually shot.
School Life
Walked to school. At school we were very parsimonious... had to cover our books because they could not be replaced. We had to clean our desk every term, etc... It was cold in the winter and we kept our overcoats on. We moved to a senior school where by then, mother had a teaching job. Had to cross the River Meuse... stopped and made to show identity card. Torch light in face to confirm who it was. School bag rifled. Had to learn German. Armistice Days. Back to the wall B children playing in the middle of the playground were Acollaborators@!! Exam questions.
At Christmas, if it was a school day and a window was left open, St. Nicholas would throw nuts in the classroom! Routine of school timetable. Soya biscuits and skimmed milk! Homework filled our evenings. There was the constant drone of air raids on factories and airplanes going over towards Germany. At night we had to go to the cellar.
Christmas Time
Christmas presents were socks, books, exercise books, the odd tangerine and the odd apple. Sometimes clothing or something mother had knitted. No Christmas parties. Went to Brussels for the New Year to visit relatives. A few little presents then from relatives.
Holidays
School holidays were usually spent at home or in the park playing games, reading books, brushing up on school work, helping with chores and tidying up our room.
Once a year we had a seaside holiday. This was usually in Ostende where we stayed in a pension. We were exposed to as much fresh air (had to do deep breathing to inhale the sea air) and as much sun as possible. We were invariably quite severely burnt on the face, arms and back but it was thought to be good for us!! There was a routine that in the afternoon we were given a sticky cinnamon bun. Most days one of the three of us managed to drop it in the sand. This was no excuse not to eat it... the sand was good for us, we were told!!
We were given some pocket money to spend at the local fair or market. Each year I saved enough money to buy a silver bracelet at the market. My ambition was to have one for each day of the week! I did not quite make it. I collected six! There was the occasional visit to my maternal grandmother in Tervuren where there was an outdoor swimming pool called Le Beau Soleil. It could be very cold... When we would come out of the pool and were getting dressed, my grandmother would come around with a spoon on which she had placed a lump of sugar soaked with brandy. This never failed to warm us up!!
Birthdays
Celebrated within the family B little treats. Can=t remember whether there was a cake or not but there was something special at mealtime to celebrate the occasion. This did not include other children. There were no children parties. What I remember as a treat, was the pretend airplane trip we used to like. The birthday girl was made to stand on a radiator so we could all see how tall she had become!!!
Towards the End of the Occupation and the Liberation
It was deemed safe enough for us to return from the Ardennes to be nearer Liege. We moved to a small terraced house on the outskirts of Liege. This made it easier for my father to commute back and forth from work. We were there when the Germans carried out the von Runstedt attack on the Ardennes. (We were lucky to have gone away from the farm where we had been staying. The farmer, his wife and sons were all shot by the German army). Also when we were in that little house, the demoralized German army passed by in retreat. It was late at night and the three of us were in bed in the top room. Hearing the noise outside, we looked at the window B despite not being allowed to do it! The soldiers dragged their feet, moaning and groaning. There was a command and suddenly they all sat down on the road. The next thing we knew was a knock at the door and my mother had to open it (my father went outside the back door in case they had come for him). There was some talking in German during which my mother was asked to provide drinking water for the soldiers. We were called down to help out and after making quite a few trips back and forth with all the vessels we could use, the officer came to the gate and, placing his hands covered by kid gloves on the railing, said, AWasser, bitte!@ Taking the hint, my mother took him water in a glass! Then they all departed but many soldiers wanted to stay there no matter the consequences... they had to be prodded by bayonets to get up again.
The next day, the road was littered with what they had left behind. There were trampled cigars, boxes and all kinds of things which they realized they could not carry any longer. We heard that before leaving another nearby village, they rounded up some men whom they assumed were working for the Resistance, made them go into a shed, tied them to each other and then set the shed alight.
The next day, the American First Army arrived in tanks. There was still some shooting towards the Ardennes from where we were but somehow it was difficult to pay attention to the danger of the situation. There were smiles everywhere and sweets and cigarettes changing hands.
The End of the War
At the end of the war, we had to pack up the house in Chaudfontaine and also the flat we had in Liege because the flat had been badly bombed. We moved to Brussels where my father was Professor of Aeronautics at the University of Brussels. We attended school in Brussels.
Before we left Liege, I remember being among the people who were lining up the street to see the prisoners being repatriated B many still in their prison uniform, many of them weak, tired and ever so thin, with huge eyes. I remember some lying down on cotton wool because they were too weak to sit or stand. They were such brave men!
There was also the shaving of the heads of those who were thought to be collaborators. Sometimes these people were undercover agents...
The Legacy of the War
You cannot undergo an experience like that of growing up under the occupation without it leaving some mark on you. Young children were praised if they got away with doing something which defied authority, i.e. taking food to prisoners or to trains taking Jews to Germany. For them it was a challenge which had its own excitement and a rush of adrenaline. This left a mark in that many remained anti- authority and with the habit of trying to Aget away with it.@
For me, it has made me mindful of the sacrifice others have made to liberate us from what was a dreadful state of affairs. The sacrifice was ultimate for so many. It left me with a deep gratitude for this. It has left me with an appreciation of my luck and with the desire to do my very best to contribute, in whatever way I can, towards improving the lives of others B in whatever way and wherever the opportunity arises. This has and still is making me work harder and give play less importance than most. It has left me with a deep empathy for those who are caught up in conflicts and especially for the anxiety and psychological trauma so many children are made to endure.
It has also turned me into a hoarder of food... Bill (her husband) will tell you, and I agree, that I have too much in my larder!! And there is the insecurity of not being able to get home again. I never leave the house without my own keys to get back in!
It has marked my sisters in different ways. The middle one (Marguerite) has had to struggle with depression most of her life. She is coping well.
My other sister (Francoise) is coping less well. She too is depressed and, perhaps as the result of living in the United States, is very dependent on consultations with her analyst to cope... She has become somewhat of a recluse, living on her own and spending a great deal of time thinking and reminiscing about the war years. She is forever trying to understand... She has not been able to leave it behind and Amove on.@
The casualties of the war years are various and varied. They are not always obvious in terms of visible signs.
This
is the end of what I can only describe as a vignette of what happened to an
ordinary family during the last world war.
THE
SECOND CHILD B
Marguerite Puvrez Harris (1931-)
AMy Growing-up Years in World War II@
Marguerite was born on 29 August, 1931, hence, was 8-13 during the war years (1940-45). She wrote the following in 1998, at the request of her daughter, Wendy, and this daughter=s new husband, Paul. She was 67 years old at the time of writing.
First of all, I want to find a title. It will be, AMy Growing-up Years in World War II.@ I have divided the topic into three time periods. The first is from my birth, in 1931, to the outbreak of the war in Belgium on 10 May, 1940. The second is the war proper, from May 1940 to May 1945. The final period is from the end of the war, in 1945, to my family=s immigration to Canada in 1946. I am writing this for Wendy and Paul (her third child and this child=s husband) who were interested in reading about my war experiences, and who stimulated my recollections.
I was born in a small town near Liege. We lived near a factory and coal mines. Father, who was a university engineer, worked in a factory which manufactured engines for cars, motorcycles and boats. The family lived in a worker=s dwelling and around us people spoke Walloon, the local French dialect. My parents did not want us to learn Walloon, considering it to be the language of the lower class. This is the first experience I had of not belonging.
Both parents were in fights with their own parents over religion and politics.
My sister, Z, (Francoise, nicknamed, AZ@) came soon after I was born. My mother felt alone and overworked.
It was clear that Hitler was going to build an empire. Belgians changed and became suspicious of each other. About half of them, including the King, sided with Hitler. A lot of Belgians feared starvation. My parents took it a step further B if one of us girls threw up, we had to eat our vomit. We were too young to fight it.
On 10 May, 1940, the war broke out to the sound of sirens, bombs falling from airplanes, and fighting on land. My mother, my two sisters and I, took a train to Brussels, 100 km from Liege. The train was packed B for example, children were in luggage racks, adults were hanging on steps outside the wagon, and some people were on the roof.
Through the train window, we could see people who, like us, were going West, away from the approaching German army. People fleeing by road used wheelbarrows, bicycles, push carts and anything with wheels. One bomb fell silently about 30 feet from where we were in the train. My mother pushed Z under our seat and she came out filthy. Outside, a big black cloud hung over the big hole, and our sunshine was gone.
During the train ride, Z had an orange. When mother threw out the peel, Z burst into tears. She said she loved that peel and wanted to keep it forever. She cried for half an hour. Maybe the threat of loss of possessions affected us all.
At first, father could not come with us to Grandma=s (our mother=s mother). He had to register with the Belgian Army. They told him to be on call, but he was free for the moment. Father joined us in Brussels by foot since he could not get a train. As he was walking, he stepped on a man who had just died. He took the dead man=s boots and motorcycle. This enabled him to join us in Brussels B and probably saved his life as well, as conditions on the road were getting worse.
After two days at my Grandma=s, we left and fled to wherever we could, in order to avoid Germans. My Grandma refused to come, saying she=d rather die in bed than on the road. We traveled mainly by bicycle, carrying nothing but our gas masks.
We finally went to Toulouse (in the south of France) on an open truck filled with refugees. The French population was also a mixture of pro-Allies and pro-Hitler. People were friendly. We were given a room. We stayed a few months and even went to school there.
My father had to be available to Belgian army, which had now become part of the German Army. The factory where he worked was now forced to produce armaments and ammunition for the German army. However, like other pro-Allies, my father did as little as possible for the Germans in both his army and civilian life.
In Liege, there are about seven bridges across the Meuse. These were all gradually destroyed B first by the Germans, then by the Belgian Resistance to interfere with the Germans, and finally by the Allies against retreating Germans. After being destroyed, they were always rebuilt, though sometimes in a makeshift fashion.
After the German occupation of Belgium and France, we returned home to Liege. The houses on our street were still up, but there were a lot of broken windows and other minor damage. From her window across the street, our cleaning lady had yelled at German soldiers who were looting. She had succeeded in making them move on, the Germans obeying her loud voice and her thus being able to prevent the looting of our apartment.
On our return, we heard that a whole Jewish family who lived four or five houses from us, had all been killed B lined up and shot at close range. We were greatly grieved as the little girls of the family had gone to school with us.
Family week-ends consisted of the five of us going to the attic to salt the beef and sift the flour to rid it of little insects. In the attic, we also had to fight off mice. This was a big deal in our family B mother would scream, and we children would squeamishly hide as far off in a corner as possible. Father would clumsily handle the broom, trying to kill the mouse, which would usually escape.
In 1945, the Germans began to use a new weapon, the V-1, an unmanned aircraft the front of which was a bomb. I remember the distinctive, frightening sound that these weapons made.
My father was a member of the Belgian Resistance Movement. Part of his job was to be in radio communication with Britain. He was able to listen to the scrambled BBC, usually at night. In order to escape detection, he would cover himself with a blanket while listening to the radio. He could have been shot if a neighbor had reported hearing radio noise.
Resistance workers sometimes knocked on our door to get instructions, usually at night. Each one was told as little as possible. Genevieve was tempted to join the Resistance but my parents dissuaded her because she was too young. We three girls had our jobs all the same. We carried resistance papers from one side of the bridge to the other. The assumption was that little girls on bikes would not arouse the suspicion of the Germans. Rifle-toting German soldiers guarded the bridge on both sides and in the middle. Our instructions were to say nothing if the Germans searched us. Fortunately, this never happened.
The black-out was very strict and enforced by soldiers. German soldiers would knock on doors or else shoot at windows from which a thin line of light could be seen. Air raids were frequent and cellars were used as shelters. We spent many hours in shelters at home and in school. I remember my father shaking violently at night because he was so frightened. Shots rang out at intervals in the distance. It sounded like someone running and being shot.
Buses and trains were always extremely crowded. People were hanging on by one toe-nail. There was a lot of coughing and smoking, and a powerful smell of unwashed bodies. Such conditions were a nest for diseases B scabies, fleas and tuberculosis. Like so many people who went through the war, my sisters and I contracted tuberculosis at some point B a mild case, just enough to give us protection.
During the occupation, food was restricted. Food stamps were allotted and long queues were frequent. Bread was like a wet sponge with a crust of sawdust. Some foodstuffs were always available for free, namely celery and a kind of turnip. One day we were very hungry and had only potatoes to eat. To make the food go further, my parents decided to cook and serve the potato sprouts too. We did not know that these were poisonous. My father, who ate most of them, became very ill.
At night, there was a strict curfew. Anyone walking in the dark had to wear a luminous circle or a Star of David.
My best friend at school, a slim, friendly girl named Monique, lived near us. She had a sister who befriended Z. To our great grief, the family moved away when their house was destroyed. In memory of my friend, I gave my first daughter the middle name, AMonique.@
My father=s best friend was Jules Bosman. He and his wife had a teenage son and a teenage daughter. The whole family worked in the underground. Their son perished on a mission. No one knows exactly what happened to him.
In 1945, we moved to Brussels. The war ended. The Allied armies moved in and the Germans moved out. Retreating Germans were furious and brutally shot civilians, if they could get away with it. Friends of ours, a family of nine, living in the country, were shot one by one in front of their farmhouse.
In 1945, father became professor at the University of Brussels. For him, it was a stepping stone to a job in Montreal with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), an agency of the United Nations. The whole family arrived in Canada on a diplomatic passport.
Conclusion
My family lived through many painful experiences during the war. For me, the worse was having to be on alert all the time and not being able to trust people. For example, I knew that if I let something slip at school about my father being in the Resistance, one of my schoolmates could inform against us, and my father might be shot.
Sadly, experiences like this can never be completely forgotten. And yet, having bad feelings and memories is part of experiencing life.
THE
THIRD CHILD B
Marie-Francoise Puvrez Hall (1932-)
Document
1: AFragments
of a War B
As Imprinted on the Mind of a Child@
I
was born on 4 November, 1932, hence, was 7-12 during the war years (1940-45). The following is part of a piece I wrote
(unsolicited) on 2 May, 1981. I was 48
years old at the time of writing.
1939
Four suitcases, one in each of the corners of the living room open, on chairs. Mother says they are ready in case we have to leave in a hurry.
May 10, 1940, 4:00 a.m.
My sister=s frightened eyes meet mine as we are awoken by a tremendous thunder-like noise accompanied by wailing sirens and explosions of all types. We jump from our common bed. She is ahead of me as we race the one floor to my parents= bed in the living room. My parents are no longer in their bed. Mother is in the kitchen. Their bedside radio blasts in a loud, tense monotone. The Germans are invading Belgium (What does Ainvading@ mean?). The voice repeats its message over and over again. Mother washes me in a small puddle of cold water in our bathtub. I am cold. The window of the bathroom shakes with vibrations. Mother says we have to hurry. AFinish your milk!@ she says in a harsh tone. AI can=t!@ AYou may never have milk again, not for a long time!@ I force down my half a cup of milk. My stomach is completely closed.
We are outside on the street. I am hot and stiff because of all the clothes my mother put on me B so we wouldn=t have to carry them. I see the planes up above that are making this continuous thunderous noise. I see things fall out of them and mother says they are bombs. She says we can=t get a taxi because everybody is trying to leave. She asks a man alone in his car if he would give us a ride to the train station. He accepts and we pour into his car. Mother thanks him profusely for putting his life in danger for us. Any delay might mean death as the bombs continue to fall.
We are at my grandmother=s, mother=s mother. I have a vague feeling of safety. At least the thundering noise is gone. My father will join us as soon as he can.
May 11, 2:00 a.m.
We are all standing in my grandmother=s dining room. My father has just arrived, He is disheveled, distraught, dirty. His face is white and with blood stains. There is blood on his dirty, torn clothes. He looks old and drawn. I am frightened. He says his train was bombed and people climbed out the windows to safety in the woods. As he was hiding in the woods, he could hear a wounded man in the ditch nearby begging for help. He did not help him. After the bombing was over, he went to the road and saw a man on a two-seat motorcycle, alone. He asked him if he could ride with him to Brussels. But they were hit by shrapnel as they were riding and the man was killed. My father had made it to Brussels on the dead man=s motorcycle.
6:00 a.m.
I am in the back seat of a car, again stiff and almost sick with heat and sweat because of my multiple layers of clothes. My father is in the driver=s seat. My mother makes a last plea to her mother to come with us. My grandmother refuses. She comes around to my side of the car. Her face is red and swollen and full of tears. She repeats that if God means for her die, she will die in her own home in Brussels.
4:00 p.m.
Tournai. Church bells are now added to the thunder-like groan of the planes and the incessant explosion of bombs. Mother says Tournai has a lot of churches. (Why do church bells have to ring to announce the bombs?).
We knock on a door. It is a man who lives alone. He is very nice and insists that we sleep in his bedroom and he himself will sleep on the floor in the living room. After much protestation, my parents accept. They sleep in the double bed. I am on the floor near my mother=s side. It is comfortable. The drone is still there but it feels safe.
May 12th
There is a long line of cars waiting to cross the border to France. I count them. Ninety-six. Suddenly, the word spreads that they have closed the border and that they are not letting any more cars through. They are letting bikes through. We buy five bicycles. Mine is used and strange, not like mine at home. My mother puts even more layers of clothes on me and I am so stiff and hot I almost cannot move my legs. We cross the border. I am tired. I fall behind. My sister shouts to hurry up. (Would they leave me, here alone, in this bleak countryside?). My front wheel turns abruptly and I fall. They are furious at me for delaying them. It is all I can do to climb back on my bike. Mother waits for me. I pedal as hard as I can with tears streaming down my face. My mother soothes me. She knows the long ride is beyond my strength.
I am in the train glued to my mother=s side. The train is so full that every space is taken up by people standing. Some even sleep while standing up, they are so exhausted. Suddenly everything shakes and the noise is tremendous. I look out the window and the earth is going upwards towards the sky. I hide underneath the seat. My mother calls me and says that when the bomb fell, I disappeared and she could not find me. My bladder is full and hurts. Mother says it is impossible to go to the bathroom because there are even people standing on the toilet seat. She says to go underneath the seat. A big, hot wave of embarrassment comes over me as I picture myself bare-bottom, peeing in front of all these people looking at me. I=ll wait. We are going to Paris. It is chic to go to Paris.
May 13th or 14th
We have a room in a building high up, higher than any I have seen before. There is a park in front and Marguerite and I want to go and play in the park. Mother says yes but to be sure and go to the shelter if the siren rings. We promise (It won=t happen, I just want to play in the park with Marguerite). But it does happen. A lady sees we are alone and tells us to go with her. A black crowd is converging towards the shelter. I don=t want to go in. It is completely dark and full of people inside. Luckily the lady stays towards the front where there is some light and I can see the empty park. I stand between her and Marguerite. I am afraid. Everything is deathly quiet. Then the siren rings back, this time in a monotonous wail announcing that the alert is finished. We hurry back home, glad to have survived the frightening adventure. Mother is angry. Don=t we know that if there is a bomb, we get killed at the edge of the shelter? Don=t we know we have to go in as far as possible inside? I feel bad. I promise to go inside next time (I am lying. I have already resolved never to go play in the park alone).
End of May
I am in a double bed with mother. My two sisters are in the other double bed. We are in Montauban, waiting for my father to be able to join us. He is in the Belgian Army. The sun shines very brightly outside and the sky is very blue. The grass is so high that you can play with it and use it as a gun. Mother is explaining to me that to have one child is nearly no problem, two children gives many more problems and three children means a whole lot of problems. She means that it is hard for her to find a French family who will accept three children in their home as refugees. (But I think, I am the third child. I will be good, mother. I won=t cause any problem).
A Few Days Later
We have had to move. The lady with the tall grass said she could not keep us anymore. We are now staying with a man, his wife and his wife=s mother, in an older house. They have a yard with chickens and I close myself in the chicken coop with my two sisters outside. It is fun.
The eel jumps from the kitchen counter onto the floor and wiggles like a giant serpent. My mother emits a blood-curdling cry. She says she thought the eel was dead, wrapped up in the newspaper. She holds a long shiny knife as she explains she was just about to cut off the head of the animal when it jumped out of her hands. I do not eat my eel for supper.
The chicken runs with its head cut off. The lady grabs it, turns it upside down and attaches it to the hook above. The blood drains out. Mother says that this is the way they kill chickens in France. She says the chicken did not suffer, that the running was just a reflex.
Now the lady is angry. She shouts while she puts our clothes on the sidewalk in front of her house. Mother is crying. We have left the chicken coop door open and all the chickens have run away. (I remember closing the door behind me as I was inside the chicken coop but don=t remember what I did when I got out, my sisters and I were laughing so. Was it me who left the door open?). I lie. I tell my mother it wasn=t me.
Mother sits the three of us in a ditch on the side of a hot, dusty, forlorn country road. She tells us to stay there until she can find a place to stay and perhaps she is never coming back. The ants crawl up my legs as I see her getting smaller on the horizon, walking slowly, exhausted. I don=t dare move. At least my two sisters are with me and I am not alone.
I am in my mother=s arms. I cannot stop crying. I have been crying for hours, ever since she came back to get us from the ditch on the country road. I had thought I would never see my mother again. When she came back, the flood of tears came that I now could not stop. My mother is holding me on her laps. She hadn=t realized that I would really believe she might not come back. She is holding me, teaching me how to take deep breaths between my sobs. I try, I try.
A few Days Later
My father has joined us and we are in a car driving to the coast of France to catch a boat to England. My father is driving. I can tell he is nervous. A group of soldiers bar the road. They are French soldiers who requisition the car. We now have nothing but the clothes we wear and whatever we can carry by hand.
We have caught a train going to the coast. My mother gives me a lemon to quench my thirst. I ask her what to do with the peel. She laughs and says to throw it out the window. But I would never leave a lemon all by itself on the side of a railroad track. I would never do that, not even to a poor squeezed lemon. I hide the lemon peel in my pocket. My mother finds it rotten a few days later.
The train has been stopped for hours. Word comes that the railroad tracks ahead have been bombed and that all will have to disembark at the next station. My father says it will be easier to find room to stay in the countryside rather than in the big town where everybody will be trying to find lodging. We have to get off quickly because this is not a regular stop and the train could start moving at any time, without warning. The people in the train help transport me through the window. The five of us are all out but part of our luggage still remains. The people throw our suitcases in the tall, yellow grass as the train starts moving. They shout that there is no more luggage. Then a small head appears again at the window of the receding train. Then a hand holding a gas mask. The gas mask, by this time very tiny, lands in the grass. It was Marguerite=s gas mask. Now we have our five gas masks and I am glad.
July 1940
My father has found work in St. Etienne and so we have moved back further north. We have one small upstairs room in a boarding house. Our laundry hangs to dry around the room. My mother washes us every few days from a tiny basin with soapy water. My skin itches from the drying soap.
Later that Month
We are back in Belgium, back to school. I tell my classmates that we were in Montauban but they do not know where that is. I explain that it is almost to Marseille. I am lying. It is only two-thirds of the way to Marseille but I wish we had gone to that glamorous city, all the way to the very other end of France. I am also jealous because some of my classmates do not return till August which means a full extra month vacation for them. My aunt (my mother=s sister), her husband and child do not return from France until almost September. But I think they were frightened because Paulette is an adopted child and therefore, I assume, more precious than the rest of us. Or perhaps, is it the fact that she was only a year old when the war started that makes her more precious?
The Occupation Years, 1941, 1942, 1943
I am in the shelter in school. We have been here for hours. Some of the children are laughing. I am sitting on a bench, quiet. The teachers admonish us not to make so much noise.
The doorbell rings. We live on Rue Renoz, on the second floor and the landlady and her family live on the ground-floor. They are not there and so my mother and I go downstairs to answer the ring. It is a man as thin as I have ever seen. He is dirty, unshaven, in rags. Could we give him some food, he says. He has not eaten for three days. I go back up the stairs with my mother. She says the man is probably lying but she will give him the rest of our French bread anyway. We return downstairs. He grabs the bread as she hands it to him and between sounds of gratefulness, swallows it almost whole. I have often wondered whether he was lying.
The doorbell rings. It is the milkman who says he has had an opportunity to buy skimmed milk. Mother has him fill all possible containers and we have a menu of skimmed milk for many days afterwards. She laughs as she serves us skimmed milk soup, a skimmed milk casserole and a skimmed milk desert accompanied by skimmed milk. I don=t mind. I like skimmed milk.
We are on our bicycles, my father, my two sisters and myself. My mother cannot join us because her hip is very painful. We have gone to the country to buy food on the black market. My bicycle is heavy but I find I can still ride it without hands. I also find that it goes downhill much faster than ever before. I zoom down the hill at full speed and almost fall on the hard pavement. I feel guilty. If anything had happened, the Germans would probably see my cargo and put us all in prison. My father is angry.
We are walking on the bridge towards home. We are again loaded with black market food. This time my mother is with us. I suddenly realize I do not have the ham with which my mother has entrusted me. I think my sister took it. I shout to her a few paces away, ADo you have the ham?@ My mother is furious. The sentinel guarding the bridge is within hearing distance. I freeze. The sentinel does not move. I thank him quietly within my heart. Perhaps he has not heard or if he has heard, he has decided not to take us to prison. I promise myself to never speak loudly in the street again.
My mother sends me to the cellar to bring five potatoes for supper. I hate that cellar. We use it as a shelter and it is dark and damp and cold. The potatoes are in the back room which belongs to the landowners but which we rent from them. The mound is rounded and higher than me. In the front room is our coal. That mound, of about the same height, is pointed as it is shaped by the truck pouring the coal down through the street-level grate. It is that room which we use as a shelter but we take care to stay away from the window.
There is a long rope fastened to the radiator of the back room in our apartment B our living room. It is so that if the Germans come and take my father from the front of the house, he can escape through the back to our neighbor=s yard. The neighbor has been told and has promised to hide my father.
My father says we have to kill the mouse. Even if it takes us the whole week-end, we have to kill it. It is gnawing away at our big linen bags of flour in the attic and if it continues, we will have more and more mice and spoilt flour. He has tried by himself but he needs our help as the mouse keeps escaping him. My father puts a broom in my hand and tells me to hit the mouse on the head if it runs towards me. I promise. I stand by courageously. (I also know that I won=t do it). The mouse runs towards me. I let out a scream and pull back, broom in the air. The scene gets repeated two to three times. My sisters do the same at the crucial moments. My father is furious. I tremble. I claim that the mouse is too fast for me. (It is true that my arms are almost paralyzed with fear of killing the mouse). Finally, the mouse is trapped. It is in the middle of the attic floor. My father hits it repeatedly with fury. My mother tells him to stop, the mouse is dead. He hits it many more times. Blood splashes.
I spend the week-end salting the hams that are hanging in the attic. If we don=t do this every month, the worms will get into them. The salt dries my hands. I am proud. I am helping us survive.
The potato mound in the cellar is getting very small. The potatoes have germinated and my mother has decided that potato sprouts must be good food. My stomach hurts as I eat my supper of red cabbage and potato sprouts. We learn later that potato sprouts are poisonous. Mother says my father vomited all night.
They have put a big cannon (DCA B Anti-aircraft cannon) on top of the apartment building six doors from our house. It is very loud as the Germans try to bring down the Allied planes which bomb the nearby bridge.
I walk across that bridge four times a day on my way to and from school. I always have either one or both of my sisters as protection. There is a sentinel at either end. Each time, we have big discussions on how to stay as far away from the sentinel as possible. Should we go across on the other side from where he is? But then, he would know that we are frightened. No, better walk in a semi-circular path around him but on the same side as he is. No, better still walk in a straight line and appear blameless, as if we had nothing to fear... Questions forever unresolved...
The other danger point on the way to school is the Gestapo headquarters stationed in a large private house with a dark entrance. Always sentinels and always fat officers going in and out. Perhaps one day, I would be sucked in as I walked by. Once in, they would question me and I would bravely answer their questions, showing them I had nothing to fear for I had done nothing wrong. They would realize their error and let me go. It would be impossible that they would send me to a concentration camp. But even if they did, I would not die. No, not me. I would survive. My body would be stronger than the others= and would resist even starvation. I would have strength to work and march under the whip of the German soldiers even if I hadn=t had any food for many days. I would do whatever they told me to do so as not to be killed. If I were tortured, I would not reveal any names, and particularly not the names of my parents which is what the Germans would be after. And yet, despite their frustration at me, the Germans would not kill me. (The fantasy always ended there, with my not knowing why they would not kill me, if they couldn=t get out of me what they wanted anyway). But I knew I would not be killed.
My father is working in a shipbuilding factory. He explains that he works as inefficiently as possible B sufficiently fast so that the Germans think he is working but so slowly that the ships never get built. He says that sometimes a ship is sent out to sea with a crucial part missing so that it will sink.
Miriam is 13 years old, my older sister=s age. She wears a yellow Star of David. Her mother is very afraid for young, pretty Miriam and often comes to speak crying to my mother. One day, Miriam disappears. The next day, her family disappears. We never see them again. My mother says Miriam was taken for the pleasure of the German soldiers.
Mother says many parents are caught by the Germans because their child has spoken too freely to a friend in school. The next day, as we are all lined up to return to class after mid-morning recess, I Akill@ every single one of my schoolmates B AI will not trust you, or you, or you, or you...@ My mother can count on me. If she is caught, it won=t be because I have inadvertently told someone that my parents are in the underground. She works till late every evening copying something in English in her best handwriting, with many carbon copies.
I am guarding the window. I am supposed to tap my father if I see a German soldier in the street. I hate doing this. I hope no German soldier comes. Finally, my father is finished. He extricates his head from under a mountain of blankets. His face is red from the heat and his hair completely wet. The radio is still on the bed underneath the blankets. He has listened to the BBC. He is happy.
We had gone to visit my grandmother (our mother=s mother) in Brussels and I had taken my school books. In the bus station, about to take the bus back to Liege, my father asks me if I have my books. I desperately want to lie, AYes, father, of course I have my books!@ Instead, I hear a muffle of desperate sounds. My father is angry. I cannot go back to Liege without my books. He and my sister will take the bus and I will come on a truck going the next day. I die a thousand deaths. I beg. I plead. ADon=t leave me alone in Brussels, please!@ He points out that I have my grandmother and my aunt (our mother=s sister). My aunt is with us and promises to take care of me for twenty-four hours. My heart sinks. I am helpless. The next day in the evening, I am put in the back of an enclosed truck with only two small windows. A lady says she is going to take care of me. I hate her. The seat is hard and my bottom hurts at every bump of the road, of which there are many. Suddenly the truck stops. People get out and point to a moving light in the star-lit sky. It is a V-1. It could stop at any time. To my unbelieving eyes, it stops. I think I am doomed. No, I am not doomed because if it had been meant for me, I would not have had time to see it stop. I breathe a sigh of relief. Let someone else die, not me. We hear the explosion. It is not particularly close. People go back into the truck. In the early morning hours, we arrive in Liege and my mother is there to pick me up. I hate her and I hate my father for having put me through this. I hate everything. I hate my school books. My mother soothes me.
The five of us are in the cellar. It is the middle of the night and we have been awakened by the wailing sirens. The bombs are dropping closer than usual. The airplanes are trying to get the bridge. My father is frightened. This time, he says, we are bound to die. He says goodbye to all of us. I love you, he says. My mother tells him not to say goodbye. I tremble all over. I hide my face in my mother=s lap. I want to die together with her. I don=t want to be left alone as the only survivor of our family. No, I would rather die. Somebody is crying. I think it=s me...
My mother opens a large suitcase on the dining room table and marvels loudly at all the food my father has brought back from Brussels, a gift from my grandmother (our mother=s mother). There is bacon, margarine, chocolate, and even an orange. My father explains how the Belgians in his train compartment got friendly and exchanged information on the black market food they were smuggling. Then, one of them got up and said all were arrested. He was a German disguised as Belgian. My father had kept his mouth shut and he had been the only one not arrested. I thank him in my heart for being so clever. I certainly would have fallen into the trap and talked. I must learn not to trust. But also, perhaps I did not want this food after all if it meant that much danger for my father. Why did he have to take risks that way?
1944
The pine smell is strong and fresh as I relieve myself in the woods. The pine needles are soft and the trees tall and stately. We are in the Ardennes, way up where the Germans would never find us. We are in hiding. But I am still afraid of the Germans, even here and so I have a contract with Marguerite so that each of us goes with the other whenever we need to go into the woods. A member of the underground ring in which my father worked, was caught by the Germans and under torture has revealed some names. He was a young man, newly married, and had resisted all kinds of torture in silence, even the cutting of his penis. It was only when the Germans said they were going to kill his young wife and child that he had revealed some names. The Germans had then killed him.
The village where we live is Renardmont. There are only two families. One, from whom we rent two small houses with five or six friends who are also in hiding, is an old couple. The man sits forever in his chair by the window, rocking, and the woman often bends over a basin on a high stool placed in front of her front door, syringing water into her ears to take the wax plugs out, she says. The other family, two large fields down from us, consists of seven sons, one daughter, and their parents. They have a large farm and sell us milk as well as other farm produce, such as eggs and vegetables. My father says that the father will not let his sons marry as he wants to keep them working on the farm.
We live together with our friends (my parents= friends, the Bosman). Our friends have children but they are older than we are. The kitchen is full of pails of water which we go fetch every few days at a spring several miles away. I sleep in a double bed with my two sisters. My father is in Liege most of the time Ablowing up bridges.@ Our favorite pass-time is to count the planes on their way to bomb Germany in the morning and on their way back to England in the afternoon. There are ninety to one hundred every day. We are glad. They are helping us.
One afternoon, on my way back from the big farm with a large jug of milk, I stumble on a barbed wire while crossing the fields. The gaping wound at the back of my left ankle is bleeding profusely. We=ll have to go down to Stavelot to get some stitches put in. I walk the several miles down to Stavelot, supported by my older sister, Genevieve, with my father walking behind on the small path. The doctor in Stavelot is kind and puts in five stitches. We hope he is not pro-German for he must suspect that we are in hiding. My father is angry. It was an unnecessary risk. I am ashamed to have put our safety in jeopardy. I hurt.
We have two rooms in the big hotel in the village of Chaudfontaine, near Liege. The dining room is full of German soldiers and we have to behave. We stay there for about a week until my parents find more permanent lodging. We look for long hours at the German soldiers marching and singing at the harsh command of their officers on the place in front of the Hotel. If they see us laugh, they might shoot us. They sing praise for their fatherland.
We are in a small house in Chaudfontaine. It has four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs. I have never lived in a house before. The owners moved because their child, a boy, has died. Many of his pictures are still on the wall. It gives a weird, gloomy feeling to the house. We do our washing at the back of the house in a fast-flowing river. My sister has lost a stocking in the current. It gets stuck on a stone and we can retrieve it. The river is beautiful.
I do not sleep. All night I cannot sleep. I tremble, I shake. The cannons and guns explode all around us all night. I don=t think this time we can survive. I am in bed with my mother, glued to her side. Her stomach doesn=t cease growling furiously all night and she apologizes to me. My father is in Liege helping the Allies blow up bridges and then rebuild them for themselves. My mother says the front line is passing over us. Frankly, this time I don=t think we will survive. Abominable noises. All night.
Our neighbors across the street are starving. They try to give good food to their child. The father eats rutabagas.
Regiment after regiment of Germans walk back to Germany. They shoot anyone they see because they are angry. They are losing the war. We watch them, hidden behind the curtain window.
Two o=clock in the morning. The bell rings. The commandant of a German regiment wants us to give water to his men. They are walking back to Germany by moonlight. Mother appeals to us for help and for several hours, we fill containers with water and pass cups through the gate of our front yard. I feel attractive in my pajama in front of all these men at our mercy and I leave my coat open so they can see my budding adolescent body. My mother sees it after a while and is furious. AClose your coat before they shoot you!@ I close my coat. They thank us in a civilized way. They ask how far to Germany. It is several more miles.
Tanks.... The Allies... They have cigarettes...
Convoys of Allies, tanks, trucks, jeeps, more trucks. Some of the drivers are black. Marguerite and I spend endless hours on the sidewalk waving in thankfulness. They smile and return our wave.
Mother has met an American soldier. His name is Jack and he is from Wisconsin. He tries to teach us English B a chicken in a car, the car can=t go, and that is Chicago. He sometimes eats with us in the evening.
I am on my bicycle going to queue for our bread. If I hear guns, I am supposed to lie flat in the gutter.
1945
We are in Brussels, in a temporary apartment near my grandmother=s apartment. There is a delicatessen store across the street. The food is good.
We have moved to a permanent apartment on the Avenue des Hortensias which has just been re-named Avenue du General Eisenhower. I walk to my new school. My classmates seem to know more than I do.
We hear of the von Runstedt Offensive. The Germans have made a desperate attempt to push back the Allies and have succeeded in the Ardennes, recapturing Renardmont and Stavelot and almost going to Liege. Desperate, they have killed everyone in sight. The old couple in Renardmont are dead. Five of the seven sons in the big farm were shot with their parents forced to look on, then the parents were shot. The daughter was spared, as were two sons who happened to be away from the farm that day. I remember the doctor in Stavelot who put my stitches in. I wonder if he was killed too. They say babies were found in the snow in their mother=s arms, shot at point blank.
We are back in Liege to recover what we can from our apartment which has been destroyed beyond repair. The red velvet curtains blow through the broken window and the piano wants to slide down onto the street below. The wind bites and we keep our gloves on all the time. Mother goes through our drawers and saves some clothes. Frankly, I hate her for having us do this. The V-2's are coming every two to five minutes with unnerving regularity. Each time, we listen to the noise, the noise stops, we count the seconds, then hear the blast. Each time we are tankful that it fell on someone else than us. It is incessant. Genevieve says she wants to go to the cellar and work at night when the V-2's stop. Mother says that if we go to the cellar, we will never get anything done. Genevieve goes to the cellar anyway. I can tell she doesn=t want to die. I follow her there for a time but I am bored in the cellar. I go back upstairs. I would rather get this thing over with. I find my favorite doll. My father says I can=t take it. We have no room for dolls. I say good-bye to her B forever.
We stay three days in this inferno. At night, we sleep in the neighbors= bed. I sleep with my mother. I shake much of the time, the bed is so cold. I am really afraid to die now that the war is going to be over soon.
We are in the Grand Place in Brussels. It is so crowded, there is standing room only. People are singing and talking and shouting. The war is over. My mother sings so hard she has tears in her eyes. She talks to a British soldier and invites him to spend is off time with us at home.
I am in the bathroom. Today, I had my first period. I am now a woman and could have children. On the wall is pasted a poem about a young man fighting for freedom. He apparently died after writing the poem. The British soldier comes often to our house for the evening meal. My mother finds him very handsome. I think he falls in love with Marguerite=s blond hair. I feel somewhat rejected. Mother is proud to have a Ason.@
1946
Mother is kneeling in front of a large trunk in the middle of the living room floor. She is packing for Canada...
In Canada:
...
My parents help us study at night. There aren=t enough chairs but we use the beds as desks. My mother says that I will have the best of both Worlds, the Old and the New. Frankly, I feel more like in the middle of the Atlantic just now.
...
I study, I study.
That year, I finish third in my ninth grade class. I WILL succeed. Despite all.
Document
2: ADear
Tefel@
The
following is part of a letter I wrote to Tefel (my second son) at his request,
on 3 November, 1991, describing the story of his own life. I included the few paragraphs about the war
which follow. I was 58 years old at the
time of writing.
The War Years
When I was seven, on May 10, 1940, we were awakened early by the bombardments of the Germans invading Belgium. My mother gave us all a bath (this is at 4:00 a.m., while the bombs were falling). We took the train to Brussels in order to ask whether my maternal grandmother would come with us to France. She refused and we went on by ourselves in a rented car. Cars were not allowed through the border with France, so we abandoned the car, rented five bicycles, and crossed on our bicycles. We had on ourselves and on our bikes, all of our possessions. We then took the train to Paris and I have vivid memories of bombs falling around the train. We stayed in Paris a few days, and I have memories of going to the shelter. The Germans were advancing and we continued on to Montauban. There, we had a spare room from two different families. The first one threw us out because we let the chickens out of their chicken coop. In any case, the Germans were advancing to the south of France and we tried to go to England. We were on the first train that did not make it to Bordeaux, the port city from which we were hoping to reach England. I have memories of quickly getting out of the train, in the middle of nowhere. The train started advancing and one of the people on the train threw a gas mask that we had forgotten in the train. It was Marguerite=s gas mask.
My father had gone to try to enroll in his Army regiment, but was told to try to survive and not be caught by the Germans. So, he joined us and we went to St. Etienne. There, we rented one room from an old lady who forbade us to either wash ourselves or our clothes because of the humidity which it would generate and the mildew it would produce. So, my mother bathed us anyway but since she did not rinse us much, I remember my skin itching.
At the end of July 1940, both Belgium and France having surrendered, we returned to our apartment in Liege. The war years (1940-45) were when I was between seven and twelve years old. I remember being afraid of the German guard on the bridge that we had to cross four times a day to go to school. I remember the potatoes stored in the cellar. I remember the flour and salted meats stored in our attic. A mouse invaded that area, and many week-ends, we had to go up to the attic to try to catch the mouse. My father finally did catch it (to my sorrow). Sometimes, my father took a trip to Brussels and brought back a suitcase full of good food, a gift from my mother=s mother. There were often chocolates, and sometimes oranges. There is, of course, the famous story of when my mother, wanting to use the nutrients in potato sprouts, served us potato sprouts for dinner. None of us girls liked it, so we did not eat. My father was very hungry, ate it, and vomited all night. The next day, Genevieve learned in her class that potato sprouts are poisonous.
My parents worked in the underground and about a year and a half before the end of the war, someone in their underground ring was caught and tortured. My parents knew his wife and small baby very well. My father decided he had to hide, as under torture, this person had revealed some names to the Germans. We went to Renardmont, near Stavelot, and shared two wooden cabins with a family who were good friends of my parents, and their two older children. I remember sleeping in one bed with my two sisters. I remember going to the adjacent farm for milk. I remember our farmer neighbor cleaning her ears with syringes on her porch. When the Allies were bombing Germany, I remember counting hundreds of planes going over Belgium towards Germany and then returning some hours later. We counted them each time, and there were always about one hundred. I remember relieving myself in the woods, and how lovely the woods smelled but I was always afraid that a German might be upon us. I never went alone and was always accompanied by Marguerite.
When the Germans retreated, we returned to Chaudfontaine, near Liege, and after a week in a hotel, rented a little four room house, near a river. It is there that one night, the doorbell rang, and a whole regiment of retreating German soldiers, on foot, asked for water. For the next two hours, we brought them water in big pots and pans. They all drank, thanked us, and continued on foot back to Germany.
We must have gone to Brussels then. My father had obtained a position as professor at the University of Brussels. We were in Brussels when the Germans re-invaded Renardmont (where he had been in hiding) and caused a lot of death. It is then that the farmers from whom we used to get milk, were all killed (parents and seven brothers). It is then, also, that our house was bombed, and became unlivable (in Liege). We took a trip back to Liege and under V-2's dropping every three minutes, salvaged what we could from our possessions. I remember saving my doll. My father was angry because he said I was too old for a doll.
My father did not want his daughters to live in the Old World, with the risk of another war. He wanted the New World and took a position at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). He went to Montreal in April 1946 and after a month, wrote us that he liked it and that we could join him. I remember Paulette (the adopted daughter of mother=s sister) and my mother=s mother crying as they waved us goodbye from the dock. The ship took two weeks to come over to the New World, and almost ran into a mine that had been left there by the Germans.
Document
3: Childhood Scream B
Stop the Killing!
I
wrote the following on 14 March, 2003, as an introduction to a book of anti-war
poems, Childhood Scream B
Stop the Killing!, which I am presently submitting for publication. I am now 70 years old.
Introduction
I was born in Liege, Belgium, in 1932. After a life-threatening breast abscess (caused by a form of sexual abuse B the squeezing of my normally swollen nipple by a nun), and a life-and-death struggle with whooping cough (brought home by my older sisters), I finally began to grow and thrive at around five months of age. That was March 1933, the month Hitler became dictator of the Third Reich. We were 25 miles from the German border.
My mother always preferred a career to bringing up children. My two sisters were wanted. I was not. I was a burden from the start and it didn=t help that I was a third girl. Genevieve was three years and Marguerite was not quite one year older than I was. Mother enrolled me in nursery school at age three, herself undertaking studies towards a teacher=s certificate. For me, school henceforth would seem more a warehouse than anything connected with life.
When I was six years old, in 1939, mother packed four suitcases and placed then on chairs in each corner of the dining room, ready to be closed for a quick departure whenever the dreaded event would take place B the German invasion of Belgium. The plan was that father would report to the Belgian army and mother, with us children, would flee to her mother, in Brussels, about fifty miles west of Liege.
The fateful day came on Friday, May 10, 1940, at 4 a.m. Awoken by a cataclysmic noise of strafing airplanes and exploding bombs, my sisters and I scampered down to my parents= bedroom on the second floor. The radio was announcing the German invasion. To the horrific sounds of falling plaster and shattering windows, mother gave us a bath in a small puddle of cold water at the bottom of the bathtub B it was unthinkable for her to leave the house unwashed. On the street (where I first saw bombs dropping out of airplanes), she pleaded with a man to give us a ride in his car to the train station. Once there, we barely squeezed ourselves into a train headed for Brussels. Father, after very narrowly escaping death on his way, joined us the next day.
The Germans were advancing fast and my parents decided to flee to France. I will always see my grandmother=s face, red, swollen and full of tears, as she went around our car to kiss each one of us, perhaps for the last time. She was refusing to flee. AThis is my home!@ she was saying, AI am staying right here! If God means me to die, then I will!@
We slept that night in the home of an older couple on whose door we had knocked at random to beg for floor space. They insisted that we sleep in their own bedroom, my parents in the double bed and us children on the floor beside it. The bombs detonated all night to the sound of church bells announcing the invasion. Lying on the floor, trembling, I put my feet on the wooden frame of the large bed to gain some comfort B through the wood.
The next day, even the western-most part of the frontier with France, near the North Sea, was closed to cars. Father sold our car, bought five bicycles and the French border guards waved us through. All our possessions fitted on five bicycles. It was a long way to Dunkirk for me, a seven year old, on a hot day, with the three or four layers of clothes mother had put on me. The bike was strange and I fell. Terror that my family might leave me behind put steel in my exhausted and suffocating body.
We stayed in Paris for two to three days. It was in a parc, playing by ourselves, that Marguerite and I had our first experience in a public shelter B those dark, smelly cement pits in which people pack themselves and wait, trembling, wondering which of those bombs they hear whistle above, could be headed for their family.
The Germans were advancing through France and we fled further south. During a period of less than twenty-four hours, mother sold her jewelry to have money to buy a car, my parents bought a car, and the French army requisitioned the car.
Both my parents, as children, had been through the German occupation of Belgium during the First World War. They did not want a repeat now when they were in their thirties. Their hope was to reach the port of Bordeaux and from there, flee to England which would hopefully escape a German invasion. But we were on the first train that didn=t make it to Bordeaux. The tracks just ahead were bombed. The train deposited us in a hay field, in the middle of the French countryside, along with our meager belongings, which nevertheless included for each one of us, a large, well-fitting gas mask.
In Montauban, in the South of France, near Toulouse, we asked asylum from a succession of French families, finding ourselves thrown out onto the sidewalk several times. France was deluged by Belgian refugees. Mother=s left hip, bad from a childhood illness, began to hurt more and more. One day, exhausted, she left the three of us in a ditch on the side of a rural road so she could walk unencumbered to the center of town for her obligatory daily report to the French authorities as to our whereabouts. I was convinced that she was abandoning us and that I would never see her again. For many, many hours after she returned, I was unable to stop crying.
Father, a civil engineer, was in St. Etienne, 200 miles to the northeast, working for the French army. We joined him there, renting an apartment from an old lady who forbade us to wash ourselves, much less do laundry, because this would increase the mildew on her walls. Mother did wash us in the sink, one by one, but her rinse water was scarce and my itchy skin kept me awake many a night.
On June 22, France surrendered. We were back in Belgium by the end of July. German soldiers were in the streets everywhere. Soon the Allies started bombing, in particular, the bridge across the River Meuse, two blocks from our home. An anti-aircraft defense cannon (DCA) was placed on the six-story apartment building at the corner of our street. The almost nightly inferno of strafing airplanes answered by the staccato of anti-aircraft artillery would last five years B the Allies bombing German-occupied Belgium from 1940 to 1944, and the Germans bombing Allied-occupied Belgium from 1944 to the end of the war, May 8, 1945.
Living under a harsh military occupation was a nightmare experience for a growing child B ages 7 to 12 years. But the worst of this seemingly unending hell were our trips to the cellar, 2-3 times weekly, mostly at night, to wait, literally, for the next bomb to drop. The combination of the obligatory immobility and the complete impossibility of escaping, amounted to torture B an agonizing expectation of probable death. Father would bid us adieu, AGoodbye, children, the next one is for us!@ He and Genevieve would be sitting on one bench; mother, Marguerite and I on another. Marguerite and I would be glued to mother, or more accurately, glued to exactly our own half of her poor, overburdened body. All of us would be shaking. To wait in a semi-dark cellar for death coming from the skies, is one of the most prolonged and damaging experience the war has inflicted on me.
In May 1944, as the Allies were gaining ground, a member of the Resistance working in the same cell as my father, was caught and under extreme torture revealed some names, among which were my father=s. We went into hiding in the Ardennes, the beautiful mountains in the southeast part of Belgium. The contrast between the serenity and harmony of the pristine pine forests and the merciless, continuous killing of human beings by one another, made a deep impression on me. I would look up at the stunning stateliness of the pines then look with apprehension behind each trunk for clues to my impending death from a gun barrel. I never went to relieve myself in the woods without Marguerite as my protective guard to spot any possible German soldiers.
During Christmas 1944, while we were in Brussels, the Germans made a last ditch attempt to regain Belgian territory. This offensive, by Field Marshall von Runstedt, made a bulge in the front in the direction of Belgium and hence became known at the Battle of the Bulge. It was one of the more sordid moments of World War II. The Germans, desperate, knowing that they had lost the war and forbidden by Hitler to surrender, fired on anything that moved. Our house was bombed and we lost many friends, in particular, those that had been so generous to us while we were in hiding.
We stayed in Brussels for a year and then, in 1946, moved to Montreal, Canada, father taking a position in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a subsidiary of the United Nations, formed the previous year. The nightmare was over. The New World welcomed us. Bombs did not drop from the skies, Jewish classmates did not disappear, murder was not a daily occurrence, there were no concentration camps, there was no torture or Gestapo, food was not rationed and school bags did not hide revolvers for the Resistance.
After finishing college at McGill University, I came to the United States to study medicine at Harvard Medical School. I entered the second year the School accepted women in their program. I married a classmate and had three children. He sought another mate, Anot burned by the war,@ after twenty years of marriage.
It has been a source of enormous pain for me that my liberators, the Americans and Canadians, have since World War II, pursued a policy of hegemony rather than the alleviation of the conditions which lead to the horror which is war. Iraqi children are at this very moment waiting for a bomb to drop on them, just like I was sixty-three years ago. Today=s political situation is reminiscent of that in 1939-1940, when one rogue state was intent on war and the would-be victims had their suitcases ready. Now, unfortunately, it is my once-liberators who are the ones bent on war.
Today=s explosive power is far, far greater than it was during the Second World War. But it only takes one small bullet or one very small bomb to kill a little girl who, while waiting in her cellar to be killed, negotiates desperately with the next bomb, begging it to drop on someone else, for she has just tasted life and would do or give anything to be able to keep it.
This book is dedicated to all the children who have been physically and psychologically split apart, devastated, alienated, maimed, disfigured and killed by the barbarism which is war.
Document 4: War Poems
I wrote the following 19 personal war poems from 1975 to the present. I have presented them here in chronological order.
(See poems which follow)
February 5, 1975
Little Girl in Your Cellar
Little girl in your cellar
You still exist, though only in memory
I am the woman you became
You didn=t die, as you were sure you would
You are still there frozen with fear
Waiting for that next fateful bomb
Feeling completely alone
Though your head lay on your mother=s lap
You lived B by chance, I know not why
But bewildered and frightened
You grew up a mock adult
And lived a travesty of life
Then one day out of nowhere and unannounced
A man appeared within your path (*)
He walked along and gently said
Life need not be a living death
You cried and cried but through it all
You became the woman I am
Almost adult, almost mature
Living life rather than fearing its end
And now I can go back to you
Little girl in the cellar
Stunned, angry and helpless
Perhaps I can soothe and comfort you
B And if not you another child
Who, like you, expects to be killed.
___________________
(*) My therapist.
February
23, 1975
The Plight
One moment playing, laughing, running
Then some flames and screams
And now your charred crimson body lies
Swollen to twice its size
Motionless, voiceless, monstrous
Giving you more pain than any two-year old can bear
Your mother dares not lay eyes on you
Your father, reinforced by alcohol
Throws himself onto what=s left of you, sobbing
How will it be later when you discover
You lack even the symbol of you manhood
But perhaps, in your wisdom, you will chose to die now
For you they called it an accident
Not so for your brothers around the globe
For them, in war, we intend it
In the name of something higher and noble
Tell me what is noble
That leads to this...
May 10, 1985
On the Anniversary of World War II in Belgium
I didn=t want to die
(That was 45 years ago
With all those bombs, rockets, cannons
Guns, pistols, concentration camps
Torture and poisoned gases)
I still don=t
This time with just one (nuclear) bomb...
I must work for peace
And tell people
This is a beautiful world.
June 9, 2000
Bombardment Revisited
Wailing sirens
The war engulfs
(Because of my badness)
Chaos, gunfire, artillery, killings
Mayhem, screams, detonations, maimings
Search lights pierce the night sky
Airplanes shriek down and groan back up
Cannons respond in staccato
Bombs moan to their destination
Shrapnel slice, cows bellow
Windows shatter, houses crumble, bridges fall,
A lottery so infernal even the devil shivers
(All because of me?)
Waiting, trembling
An explosion
I heard the bomb
Therefore it wasn=t for me
Waiting, shaking
No explosion
I don=t hear the bomb
Therefore it=s meant for me
The ground shudders
The house cracks and leans
Dust fills the air
Surely the next one is for us
All will disappear
Terror
Let me crawl into your arms
October 6, 2000
I killed Her
The bombs were falling and for sure one would drop on us
My mother sitting beside me, patiently, resignedly tolerating my glueing myself to her for safety
(Or rather glueing myself to Amy@ half of her, since Marguerite Aowned@ her other half)
My father further away with Genevieve, shaking like a leaf
AGoodbye children.! The next one is for us! Goodbye children!@
Then my mother: AFor God=s sake, shut up!@
The cellar plunged in almost total darkness according to strict blackout rules
The incessant noise of haphazard destruction
AI am going to die
But why? Why are they trying to kill me?
I haven=t done anything
Or maybe I have. I want to live
I very much want to
live
Then that must be my
crime
I want to live
and they don=t
want me to live
I must kill the me
that wants so much to live. She wants to
live too much@
So I killed her. I killed my soul
I killed her because she was going to die anyway
Better die now at my hands than later at their hands
It hurts less when you kill yourself than when others kill you
And the timing is more certain, under your own control
Now they could never get to her because she was already dead
A private murder hidden from all -- the Allies (our supposed Afriends@) dropping their bombs
The Germans who wanted to kill us all, my parents who never took notice
I laid her in her coffin
Sweet innocent child
Her face white, her eyes closed, peaceful, no longer afraid
She was my heart, my soul, my hope for happiness, my hope for life itself
A ghost remained behind
A body numbed, without life, without wish, without passion
Now it won=t hurt so much to die
And in any case a murderer deserves to die
But the bomb didn=t drop on us
Against all odds the murderer lived
A criminal unable to rescue her soul from death
Doomed forever to suffer for her crime
Later in life, the murderer became a missionary
And accused all of humanity of being murderers
For no one had ever been able to save that Alast@ suffering child in the world
The child who was me (*)
***
____________________________________________
(*) I was the third and last child in our family.
January 14, 2001
Me and the War
Both unwanted
Both in the way
Both a big burden on my parents
Both a noose around their neck
If I were not there
Perhaps the war would not be either
Both gone
And the world better off
The war is hateful
So am I
Nobody wants war
And nobody wants me
January 14, 2001
I am the War
Of course I kill. I am the war
My mother hates men. I=ll kill them for her
My father hates women. I=ll kill him for it
I am the war. My power reaches everywhere
I hate men. They kill
I hate my father=s penis
And by extension, I hate him
I want to kill him
Men are soldiers and they kill
If I killed all the men
There would be no war
When I become a woman, I=ll kill all the men
German soldiers torture me
They are men
I resist
I=ll resist men always
My mother feels like killing my father sometimes
When I grow up, I=ll feel like that also
To be a woman is to wish to kill a man
Men hurt and kill and deserve to be killed
My father says sex is no different from eating or defecating
Wearing clothes a sign of bourgeois decadence
Sex a natural animal function to preserve the species
Marriage only the invention of irrational people
War cows even him, this most powerful of individuals
I see how it makes him helpless, defenseless, afraid, subdued
I want to be, like war, more powerful than he
Then kill him for parading his penis around as a badge of superiority
I=ll cow him anyway because as a woman
I=ll have something he can never have
The ability to bear children
That only a woman can have
But then, one needs men to have children...
***
June 2, 2001
To Miriam
Amid the bombings you disappeared one day B I think on your way back from school
No trace, no word, no news, no comments
And the next day your parents and two brothers had gone from your home
Vanished, evaporated, turned into thin air
Mother said you had been taken for the pleasure of the German army
Were they gentle to you? Harsh? Brutal? How many used you? Did you get pregnant?
Did they kill you afterwards? How? Did they torture you first?
Was it in Belgium or in Germany? Did they send you to a concentration camp? Which one?
I refused to let you die and secretly, within myself, kept you alive
Put you in a bag like an old, well-used, forever-smiling, painted wooden doll for storage
What else to do since no one ever heard or talked about you
Your 13 year old life suddenly excised mercilessly from my surroundings?
Why you? Why not me? Your eyes were so bright, cheerful, lively, self-assured
Your black hair, wide smile, squarish shoulders and ready giggle so familiar
You were just one of us until the Star of David made its appearance on your lapel
Searing yellow, foreboding, ominous, singling you out from among us
The urge to live took possession of me, exploding in me like a murderous bomb
Splitting me apart, breaking all bounds, overflowing all banks, consuming all parts of me
Nothing else mattered. And deep within me, at the edge of my consciousness
I was glad it was you who had died and I was still living
I would make it up to you by living for both of us
Seek your forgiveness by always taking the victim=s side
Never tempt fate by asking more than mere physical life
I would keep you alive within me always
But my life=s worth never matched what yours would have been
My guilt towards you never left me
My hate of others for killing you never abated
My loathing of myself for living instead of you never lost its poisonous sting
I became a small, hardened black ball parading as a person
Fearing happiness lest it might make you jealous
Doubly sealing the bag which was your home
Never mentioning your name except briefly in passing, like a long-lost fiction
Softly, gently, with care, respect and many tears, I bury you now
I must stop hating myself. For had you lived, you would not have turned on yourself
The light you radiated was too bright for that
Good-bye, Miriam. You will shine in my heart, always
I am sorry fate was so unjust to you.
***
June 9, 2001
A Sea of Dead
1940
The ditch in which my father has escaped when his train was bombed, already harbors two men
The driver of a motorcycle who is dying and his passenger who cannot drive the vehicle
My father becomes the new driver. He and the passenger abandon the dying man
Our train Dunkerque-Paris stalls and shakes as it is being strafed and bombed by the Germans
Out the window I see a bomb falling onto the cow pasture. With a tremendous detonation
The earth and cows are blown sky-high. Were there any people in the pasture?
1941
Commotion and gunfire interrupt a rare trip with my mother to downtown Liege
The Germans are cordoning off a city block, rounding up all men for deportation to labor camps
One man runs. I hear gunshots. He falls to the ground. I avert my eyes
1942
My mother points to a cattle train going east, towards Germany
They are Jews in those wagons, she says, not cattle. No one knows what will happen to them
Like no one knows what happened to Miriam?
Awoken from sleep and huddled in the cellar, we are waiting for a bomb to drop
Suddenly, a surprised gasp in the street, an angry tirade in German, and three shots
Did the man die? Why did he break the curfew? Who found him the next day?
1943
My father=s four train companions spend the trip comparing their smuggling feats
Upon arrival in Liege, one of them gets up, shows his Gestapo card and arrests the other three
My father, thanking his own silence, returns home with his two suitcases of smuggled food
Wailing sirens announce a bombardment as my father returns from work on his motorcycle
He knocks on a door to request shelter. A woman graciously lets him in and they talk
The house is hit, the
woman killed. My father comes home dumb,
ghostly, dirty, bloody, shaking
A woman explains to my mother how she takes her newborn with her wherever she goes
She fears being killed by the Resistance and hopes the baby will give them pause
Her husband, under torture, has revealed some names B including my father=s
1943-44
Whiling away the time in Renardmont, I count the airplanes on their way to bomb Germany
They take hours to pass overhead, totaling hundreds per sortie, in formations of five or ten
My heart fills with hope. The more Germans killed the better
1944
All trains have been requisitioned. I am traveling to Liege in a truck, alone with six adults
The alert sounds. We stop and look at the starry sky strafed with flying bombs and search lights
As I am looking at a
V-1, its motor stops. If I die, I will
die alone
Christmas 1944 B The von Runstedt Offensive (ABattle of the Bulge@)
They killed the old couple next door when they re-took Renardmont
She will never again syringe her ears, bent over a basin, on her front porch
He will never again sit contentedly in the sunshine, taking in the pine smell of the Ardennes
Our other neighbors while we were hiding, were a family with eight adult children
The Germans killed six, point-blank, in front of their parents, then killed the parents
They had given us milk, protected our identity, introduced me to the wonders of four-leaf clover
A young mother was shopping, infant in her arms, when the Germans re-invaded Stavelot
She fell in the snow when they killed her. When her family dared venture out three days later
They found her body, the baby under it, frozen to death
The Stavelot doctor must have surmised we were in hiding
He said little and asked no questions when he treated my wound six months ago
Did the Germans spare
him, as he spared us, when they re-took the town? Is he dead?
1945
A train of American wounded is refueling in Tirlemont, between Liege and Brussels
Through an open door, I catch a glimpse of a young man, face up, immobile in his tidy bunk bed
I cannot see his wound. Can he move? Will he die?
Brussels has a well-publicized motorcade to welcome back its concentration camp survivors
I wave enthusiastically from the sidelines B only to realize I am waving at the remains of men
Bald, dazed, lifeless, wide-eyed skeletons in well-pressed suits. Is that what they call alive?
My cousins, in their early twenties, have spent the past two years in Buchenwald
Victor has just returned. Aunt Maggie refuses to believe Alain is dead. She loses her mind
And begins a life-long search for the son she as a young widow, raised single-handedly
We have moved to Brussels. I stick war poetry on the wall of our small toilet stall
One is by an American, wounded, saying goodbye to his wife
Did he die? Did he die for me?
1946
The dead, the dying, the almost, the probably and the imagined dead
Fuse into one large, thick amorphous sea of dead
Which I bring to Canada.
June 15, 2001
Food
and Punishment
1940
Amid the incessant noise of airplanes, bombs, artillery, breaking glass and a shaking house
Mother tells me to drink my milk. AYou won=t have any more for a long time,@ she says
Will this then be my new punishment?
Off our train, the cows were eating peacefully when the bomb dropped
They had done nothing wrong. How much more I then, who causes so much trouble
Deserves to die?
The lemon mother gave me was good to me. It quenched my thirst
How can I now throw it out the window as she tells me to do?
I will not abandon it and cause its death. I=ll keep it safe in my pocket
The French lady may be giving us shelter but she is a killer
She knocks her chicken on the head with her fist, slices their throat
Hangs them upside down on large hooks and waits for them to bleed to death
The eel was still alive wrapped in its newspaper when mother placed it on the kitchen counter
It jumped on the floor and slid forcefully away for its life
But mother grabbed it and mercilessly cut off its head. Even mothers kill
1941-42
The mouse eating our flour in the attic, must have been hungry
It probably wanted to live as much as I do. I heard it scurrying for its life
But father in his rage beat it to a bloody pulp. Even fathers kill
The worms in our bacon hanging from the attic ceiling needed to be killed
Mother boiled them in grease. But they had their revenge
She spilled the grease and burnt her legs
1943
How loathsome of me to put my whole family in danger by stumbling on barbed wire
While getting milk and needing medical care in Stavelot
Will the doctor denounce us? Will I cause my whole family to be killed?
1944
I am earning my right to live by risking my life. I bike to town daily to queue for bread
If the siren sounds, I am supposed to hide in a ditch
But I know I never will. I am much too scared to die
1945
Long regiments of exhausted, dirty, limping German soldiers in faded uniforms
Pass by our house on their way back to Germany. At gunpoint we give them water
They seem human. Are we traitors? Are they the ones who tried to kill us?
1946
Killing is punishment
For something one has or has not done
And I who caused so much misery to my parents
Should surely have been among the dead.
***
July 28, 2001
Mise-en-Scene: World War II
How to give up my war-colored glasses
Stop turning Boulder into Liege
The year 2001 into 1940-45
Americans into Germans
How to stop hearing sirens as air raid alarms
Airplanes as strafing bombers
Thunder as exploding bombs
Fire-crackers as artillery fire
How to stop reacting to cars as armored tanks
The spattering of exhaust pipes as rifle shots
Pens on the ground as volatile land mines
Policemen as soldiers ready for the kill
How to stop converting English into German
The wealthy into Gestapo officers
The powerful into replicas of the Fuhrer
The poor into victims of an occupying army
How to stop expecting conflict to lead to death
Trembling at the sight of war on a movie screen
Hiding in the crowd to avoid being a target
Asking for physical life only lest the bomb B in its wisdom B find me after all
How to stop hating people for participating in the carnage
Seeing all as equally oblivious to the ravages of war
Their days filled with banality while others die
Their claim of superiority based on their capacity to kill
What to do with those pervasive, familiar feelings
My worthlessness B useful in giving the logic for why the world did not want me
My guilt for being alive when so many B immensely more capable B died
My outrage that my life should have been deemed expendable
How to stop re-staging the War
Let go of my aloneness, alienation, distrust
How to stop ensuring my continued unhappiness?
September 28, 2001
In the Cellar
The dark void which surrounds me extends to infinity
From my center through my pajama and coat
Through my mother=s limp arm on my shoulder
To the walls of the cellar and beyond
Where airplanes fly and bombs drop
In the blackness of the night
My heart wades in thick nothingness
I float in emptiness, without mooring
My father announces that the next bomb is for us
In a few minutes, I=ll be under the rubble of our house
Hurting, bleeding, crying for my mother
But she will be dead and not respond
I so desperately want to live
Without legs, then is it better to die?
And if I bleed, would I really die as they say?
Why could I not hold on by sheer willpower to live?
Bomb, please don=t drop on me. Let me live
I promise I=ll never ask for anything else
I rub against my mother -- that is, my allotted half of her
(Marguerite, on her other side, has the right to her other half)
I briefly pity Genevieve for being assigned my father
The lonely drone of airplanes continues
No one speaks of the horror that is about to befall us
I am alone in a vast, arid, nameless desert
Suddenly, the high-pitched shriek of an airplane diving down
Sears the air. The whistle of a bomb, a deafening detonation
The shattering of glass. The house trembles. I tremble
The anti-aircraft guns atop the high building six doors down the street
Go into high gear. Reversing the pitch of its shriek, the plane
Groans back up, out of range. Father declares that this one was close
I don=t know how long passes before I hear steps in the street above us
Probably a soldier, flashlight and gun at the ready, checks our curfew
I hold my breath but he passes our house
I=ll see soldiers tomorrow on my way to school
They are the monsters who want to kill me
But the bombs falling now are our friends= and they kill just the same
I am a piece of dirt, bad, dumb, worthless, in the way
A criminal not deserving to live
Sometimes I want to die B but that is betraying myself
I really want to live. It is the others who want to me dead
The Germans definitely don=t want me. I hate them all
My mother tolerates me. Does she want me to live?
I can=t stand it
I am splitting apart
The void is engulfing me
Year
2001, Boulder, Colorado
The
World Trade Center disaster
The
return of death from the air
I
can=t
stand it
I
am splitting apart
The
void is engulfing me
***
December 1, 2001
The War B Now Inside
You are my core, my center, my master
Your truth wells from suffering, your wisdom from experience
I, a mere an envelope grown around you to protect
And mediate in this obliviously murderous world
Stop,
stop. stop the war
Stop
this killing. this torment, this constant punishment
I
want to live. Stop them from killing
Adults
kill. I hate them all. I hate the world
Don=t you ever become one of those adults
who kills
When
you grow up, prevent them from making war
Don=t let this suffering happen again, not
even to one other child
Promise
that if you live, you=ll
make them stop their ceaseless killing
I became a doctor to decrease pain and suffering
Specialist in public health to forestall predictable deaths
Psychiatrist to understand why they kill
Researcher to know what turns them into killers
Not
enough, you thankless traitor, deserter of our bargain
They
are still making war, still hurting children like they hurt me
You
are a citizen of a country that kills
You
pay taxes, have stocks, swim while others beg for their life
Don=t you know that it is thanks to me that
you survived
When
not a soul was there to soothe your loneliness, share your mind-splitting pain
I
took for myself the terror of waiting to be killed, the torture of impending
death
I
let you play, go to school, grow. And
now you are adult and I have never left the war
I am a rat infested with plague
I am war itself, black, tarred, despicably guilty
A miserable failure in my one assigned task
Too base even to deserve solace
Hear
my moan, my lament, my agony
I
gave you all. I myself could never grow
The
pain was too great
I
could only freeze and endure
My
strength could do no more.
***
June 2, 2002
Indictment of My Ancestors
Your legacy to me was a culture of selfishness
Greed, self-centeredness, competition, exploitation and war
Those bombs that almost dropped on me as I was awakening to life
Were your legacy to me. Yours as much as Hitler=s
You, even more than the Germans, had participated in
And gained from the violence pervading the European culture
Hitler only turned your own weapons against yourselves
Weapons which you had been using for over four centuries
Against others, turning people into slaves and nations into colonies
I indict you for this heritage
How sweet to have been born into a culture respecting of life
A civilization whose goal were not self-aggrandizement
But rather equality, justice, empathy, interpersonal respect
Understanding, peaceful conflict negotiation, joy in diversity
Perhaps then, I would not have had to cower in agony
Because bombs were falling from the sky B
A sky you should have bequeathed to me beautiful
Forever and ever only beautiful
Today, our same culture is marring the sky with nuclear bombs B
That same sky that for our descendants should remain beautiful
Forever and ever only beautiful.
January 1, 2003
1940, 2003
In 1940, we had our suitcases ready
One in each corner of the dining room
We would only have to close them and flee
Whenever the Germans decided to attack
But my grandmother refused to flee
She said if God willed her to die, she would
This was her home and she would stay
Even if that meant she had to die
In 2003, the Iraqis have their suitcases ready
One in each corner of their dining room
They will only have to close them and flee
Whenever the Americans decide to attack
But some have decided to refuse to flee
They say if God wills them to die, they will
This is their home and they will stay
Even if that means they have to die
Didn=t Hitler know the torture it was
To live under the threat of sudden death
At the hands and whims of others?
No, he wanted his own aggrandizement
Doesn=t Bush know the torture it is
To live under the threat of sudden death
At the hands and whims of others?
...............................................................
January 11, 2003
The Cellar-School
It doesn=t award degrees or certificates
And is not recognized by the authorities
Its walls are unfinished and mildewed
Its lighting a weak, yellow ceiling bulb
There are no windows or blackboard
No pens, bright colors, books or maps
No teachers to explain or give exams
For in it, bare facts speak for themselves
It takes two days to transmit the lesson
The first is above ground. Upon awakening
The child gazes upward, dumbfounded
What are these things falling out of airplanes?
A blood-curdling noise deafens her ears
She shakes and watches bewildered
As the earth surrenders itself up the sky
That instant also turning her into a coward
The second day, the child does not look
She rehearses the scene by its sounds
As she runs to the cellar, her life school
Helpless, scared, seeking only survival
She has learned that some people kill
And if one does, then they all could
She has lost her center of control
Her life now belongs to those she fears
She must either propitiate or escape them
And though on the outside she still lives
Inside she has died, only a blank remaining
To decide whether to beg, cringe or flee
Why, she asks? What have I done?
What horrible crime have I committed?
But she realizes there is no forgiveness
She must face alone the fate handed to her
Soon she discovers there is no God
For no God would ever allow this
Hers is only emptiness and dread
Life become a prelude to death
I spent my youth in such a school
Daily I pleaded with my enemy
Bomb, not here, please, let me live
On somebody else, I=ll do anything
The sky was one of my biggest losses
Even blue it became a carrier of death
I preferred our dungeon-like cellar
My head buried in my mother=s laps
I don=t know history or the liberal arts
I was not honed to be a leader
But I know the preciousness of life
And that wars should never happen
As I have grown older, I have noted
That cellars tend to be for the powerless
The elite often only reading about them
At times even skipping crucial passages
Cellar-schools may keep bodies alive
But courage, faith, trust, the joy of life
Self-assurance, belief in others= goodness
Are all murdered mercilessly, irrevocably
As is also the hope that the non-initiated
Might one day understand the devastation
Wrought in the heart of the pupils
Cellars wield a deep and indissoluble divide.
***
March 8, 2003
War
At the time it was happening, the war was so obvious
It did not require description. It was everywhere B
The air, the sounds, all the nooks and crannies of daily life
Soldiers, guns, tanks, bombs, killings, disappearances
Imprisonments, torture, curfews, food and fuel shortages
All was part of the self-evident world in which I lived
Neither of our parents talked to us children about the war
Father, though in the cellar with us during bombardments
Wrote afterwards, AFor the children, all this hardly existed@
Mother faced the war much as she would a bad toothache
An unavoidable and recurring burden to be born stoically
She had survived the first War. We might survive this one
We settled in the New World and the nightmare receded
Increasingly, the war became like a tar stain on my skin
Large, black, sticky, indelible, glaringly present, visible to all
The mark of my differentness, inferiority, unfortunate life
AYou were in the war? How was it?@ they would ask
ABad,@ I would reply, hating them for singling me out
The taint was there as I tried to be best ever wife and mother
I had an accent, I was a refugee, I had come from Belgium
My childhood had been maimed, I lacked a good education
The war transformed itself into symptoms I could not suppress
My abhorrence of war movies, my panic at firecrackers
My hate of soldiers, power, the German accent, non-pacifists
In therapy, I told John Gorman I had been damaged by the war
AHow so?@ he said, AYou survived and so did your family@
So I was clean after all, unblemished, declared fit for life
But then, why did I continue so unhappy among Americans?
In my alienation and isolation, I would try to console myself
AHow superficial to be happy while others are suffering!@
Then I knew what I had B post-traumatic stress syndrome
A respectable, commendable and guilt-free diagnosis
Others had done me wrong and hence my difficulties
I was normal, my experience abnormal. Good, until I asked
AWhy is it me only and not any of my would-be murderers
Who needs medical treatment? Was their experience normal?@
You said in our last session that you were a witness (*)
I know now what you meant B that you were with me
Standing by, your soul with me, validating my suffering
But at the time, I misunderstood. I felt like a museum piece
An old artifact at which people stare in awe and disbelief
Antiquated, odd B the relic of someone who has seen war
And all this time, my heart has never ceased to scream
High-pitched, desperate, AWhy did you do this to me?
How could you try to kill me, a vulnerable little girl
Who so much wanted to live and taste this world?
Don=t you want to live? Were you not once a child?
Why did you try to take this life that is so dear to me?
AI cannot understand why people kill,@ says the me
Who has now become an old woman. Don=t kill, ever
Because if you do, it is me you could be killing
Don=t kill, don=t kill, don=t kill B don=t kill... me!
***
____________________
(*) During my present psychoanalysis.
March 15, 2003
AAfter the War@
It was a most nebulous concept but I used it all the time
I didn=t remember what life was like before the war
Much less knew how it might be once the war ended
Killing for me was part of a continuous hellish present
What would newscasts report, if there were no war?
But the phrase was magic and honey to my ears
A focus on the future made the present more liveable
It soothed me to know that some people certified
That a world without murders could really exist
Can you imagine, without bombs, tanks or guns?
It also enabled me to defer gracefully all of life=s tasks
Why plan, for instance, until this awful war is over?
Why learn and engage, if soon one might be killed?
Survival should surely be my one and only focus
Any other effort a detraction from this one sacred aim
Then, one day, the golden, craved-for moment arrived
The now in which I lived, became a now Aafter the war@
What to do with it? How to cope? I was in disarray
How does one take into account one=s own wishes?
How does one know oneself, if one has never looked?
Unprepared to cope with such an unregimented world
I continued to hide, this time in my own mental cellar
Placing others in the role of authoritarian decision-makers
Much like bombs, the Gestapo or German soldiers
I remained in my well-honed role of helpless victim
I was not among the 46 million killed in World War II
I was not in any banal pronouncement or dry statistics
But nevertheless, just the same, the war took my life away
Insidiously, surreptitiously, with my own participation
Unforgivably, without even my own awareness of the fact
You who today are planning to bomb and invade Iraq
Will you, in sixty-three years, look for long-term effects?
Or perhaps you plan while you Areconstruct@ the country
To reshape and remake the psyche of its hapless children?
My life is up for reconstruction
Do you care what happened to me?
March 29, 2003
A Child=s World Destroyed
That bridge near our house was part of my world
I walked over it four times a day to and from school
It should never have been a target for destruction
The six-story building at the end of our street
Was new, stately, the home of many families
It should not have been a platform for cannons
House cellars are made for rats, not for little girls
To sit in, terrified while they negotiate with bombs
So the next one will please drop on somebody else
Living room radiators should not be anchors
For a rope down which a father will slide and flee
When soldiers break in the front door to capture him
Home windows carefully marred with crisscross tape
To increase their resistance to shattering from blasts
Themselves shatter the outside world of the child
Dandelions expect to be freely picked and smelled
So the child can settle whether or not they are fragrant
They should never be next to mines disguised as toys
Ants deserve to instill marvel at their own pace
Without interruption by death-announcing sirens
Without their earthworks being flattened by tanks
The blue sky is entitled to hold only clouds and birds
Invasions by formations of bombers draw the child
Into counting killing machines instead of life wonders
Stars should be allowed to display their grandeur
Unmimicked by rockets whose light suddenly vanishes
Causing the child to shrivel in fear, certain she is doomed
And tree trunks should hide only squirrels and foxes
Not ever enemy snipers on the lookout for a kill
Especially if the child knows it is her father they want
A mother should not have to fry worm-infested ham
Preserved beyond its time in anticipation of famine
The grease spills and burns both the mother=s legs
A father should not return home pale and half-mute
Recounting how he rode a dead man=s motorcycle
Or how the woman next to him was crushed to death
It is not right that friends should suddenly disappear
Because they are Jewish, or that schools have shelters
Where children are admonished to have good manners
But most of all B it is not right that grown-up people
Who have reached that exalted state of adulthood
Should try to kill a child whose life has just begun
You destroyed, maimed, distorted and disfigured my world
Thereby doing the same to me, though you did not kill me
I had hoped that you might stop your deeds
And spare those who grew up after me
But the children of war have it worse now
You have honed and amplified your killing skills.
***
REFERENCES
Wyedemans, Marguerite Puvrez, Letter, 2 June, 1940, to Anne-Marie (Nany) Wyedemans Becquet, 4 pages.
Wyedemans, Marguerite Puvrez, AA Baby Girl,@ 1972, 29 pages (pp. top of 20, mid-21 - 23, mid-24 - 25, bottom of 26 - top of 28, and bottom of 28 - 29).
Wyedemans, Marguerite Puvrez, AThe Puvrez Family,@ 1972, 46 pages (p. 21).
Puvrez, Paul Auguste, AUntil Four O=clock in the Morning,@ 1972, 16 pages (pp.12- mid-16).
Lane, Marie-Genevieve Puvrez Stegen, AGrowing up in Belgium during the Last World War,@ Outline for a speech to the British Legion, London, England, March 2002, 6 pages.
Harris, Marguerite Puvrez, AMy Growing-up Years in World War II,@ 1998, 3 pages.
Hall, Marie-Francoise Puvrez, AFragments of a War B As Imprinted on the Mind of a Child,@ 1981, 14 pages (pp. 1 - top of 13).
Hall, Marie-Francoise Puvrez, ADear Tefel,@ 1991, 9 pages (pp. bottom of 1 - mid-3).
Hall, Marie-Francoise Puvrez, Childhood Scream B Stop the Killing!, submitted for publication, 2003, 119 pages (Manuscript pp. 10, 11, 12-13, 14, 15, 16-17, 19-20, 21-22, 23-24, 26, 27-28, 29, 30-31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38 and 40).
***