War and Dinner

Francine, my friend and neighbor, had Mr. Besse, Preston, and me over for dinner last night at her house. We had a fun time, starting at 7:30 and we didn’t end until midnight. Francine’s house used to be the schoolhouse for Latour, and it was the first time that Roger had returned to the interior of the building since he graduated at the age of twelve in 1940.

He told us that his diploma was signed by Marechal Petain. Excited, I asked if he still had it. He said it had been thrown out years ago. His father was a local leader in the Resistance so there wasn’t any sentimentality about keeping Petain’s signature in the house. During the war, the schoolchildren designed propaganda posters for contests, (as children in the U.S. now design dental hygiene posters for contests) sang patriotic songs, and studied a version of current affairs that they regurgitated but the teacher and their parents ridiculed.

I mentioned that I was currently reading a book about the Resistance and I was learning that it is an incredibly complicated period of history to wrap your mind around. Oui, Roger agreed, that is the problem, people think that it was black and white, the Resistance, the War, but it was terribly complicated and its complications are still evident today in the politics of France, and in the local social relationships. People hold long grudges here, and who can blame them when the grudges revolve around life and death. So you just don’t bring up the war because you may have a family at your table who fought hard in the resistance, another family that collaborated, another that just sat on the fence. They all get along socially, as long as the war isn’t mentioned.

When the Germans first invaded France, Roger’s father went up to fight and was saved by that daring British evacuation from Dunkirk. Our neighbor Paul, wasn’t so fortunate. He was taken prisoner at the beginning of the war and was kept as a POW in Germany for the next five years. Having saved the French, the British weren’t too keen on letting their neighbors stay in England and so they packed them onto a boat and dropped them off in Normandy. Roger’s father stole a bicycle and made his way back home. The trip took him weeks. Once back, Roger’s father was the head of our village’s Resistance cell.

Before I heard that Roger’s father was in the Resistance, a neighbor told me that during the war, there was a sixteen-year-old girl who was shot by the Resistance because she wouldn’t accept the advances of one of the men in their group. According to this source, they falsely accused her of being a collaborator, and then executed her near the communal laundry fountains. No one from the village would help her father bury her, and so he had to go alone with a wheelbarrow to retrieve her body. When I heard this story, I romantically thought that perhaps this incident explained why Roger never got married. Perhaps this girl was his girlfriend and he never recovered from the trauma.

Mais, au contraire. A week after I heard this story, Roger was over for dinner, and after a little wine, I was brave and in my abrupt-American way I asked him if he knew about this incident at the Belaye fountains where a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl was shot by the Resistance. He rolled his eyes and said that first of all, she wasn’t sixteen, she was in her twenties, as if revealing her advanced age destroyed any rumor that she was an innocent. And secondly, she deserved to be shot because she was sleeping with the Germans. I was surprised at the vehemence with which he said this for he is usually so mild-mannered.

People living next to each other tell wildly conflicting stories which I have no doubt, they believe to be the gospel’s truth. For all I know, perhaps Roger’s father was an instigator in condemning the woman to death. Maybe he pulled the trigger. But I don’t think this is true, because I think that the other neighbor would have mentioned his name if that was the case. Often, the stories can only be pieced together if one examines what has not been said. I greatly enjoy sitting around and drawing these war stories out from my neighbors. Yet I am always frustrated when I do, because there is no way, even for those who lived through those years, to grasp the truth in all its complexity. Historical truth is a myth.