Dinner and War

You may recall an earlier post, “The War’s Over,” where I wrote about a young woman that was shot by the local Resistance for allegedly collaborating with the Germans. Last night, I had a small dinner party in celebration of my neighbor Francine’s past and my upcoming birthday. I again asked Roger what he knew about the woman who was shot by the Resistance in our little commune. And he said, “Which one? There were two.”

Then he proceeded to tell me that the young girl, who I’ve been puzzling about ever since Madame Dupuis mentioned her, was living across the road from our farm during World War II with a woman who was teaching her how to become a seamstress. This little fact aggravated me because I wondered why no one had mentioned it before when I was asking questions. I assumed she lived up the hill in the commune proper. I get frustrated with my rough French because I have trouble interviewing people about stories that I’m interested in, and if they tell me an interesting fact, I often don’t pick up on it.

The Maquis (Resistance members) did take this woman and shot her dead by the water springs halfway between our commune and another village. Roger had previously said that she was in her mid-twenties, but last night, he lowered her age to twenty which is approaching Madame Dupuis’ claim that the unfortunate female was only sixteen when she was killed. Roger did confirm more of Madame Dupuis’ story when he told us that the woman’s father had to come down to retrieve his daughter’s body with a cart and two work horses. Madame Dupuis had told me that the father had to walk down from the hill commune with a wheelbarrow and added that no one would help him retrieve or bury the corpse. I’m going to visit Madame Dupuis soon and quiz her some more about this young woman. Finding out the “truth” is starting to obsess me.

Roger didn’t give us too many details about the other woman that was shot and killed by the Resistance except to say that her son was the diabetic amputee who had previously been a truck driver here at the flour mill, and he died last year. I have to ask Madame Dupuis about this woman. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of women were murdered in France, during and immediately after the war, not because they were collaborators, but because they had displeased some local man.

Roger said what I have been thinking for quite a while, that it’s practically impossible to make judgments concerning right and wrong during a war; people just don’t understand the complexities of war unless they have lived through one. He said that it must be very difficult to be living in Iraq now, because they have a foreign invader and a civil war going on at the same time.

I did discover last night a proud fact about my little valley and my two nearest communes: that there were many refugees from Occupied France living here throughout the war and Jew or Christian, they were protected by the locals. None were reported to the German authorities and the communes provided free housing to them.

Roger told me that our neighbor, Leonce, the hard working, spry old man with the weed whacker who on his Sabbath day of rest bikes thirty kilometers for fun, was taken prisoner by the Germans during a round-up of 18-35 year olds to be sent for slave labor to Germany. Leonce was taken to a holding area in the northwest of our departement to await shipment to Germany. There, with the help of some Gendarmes, he and ten other men escaped. Roger said that by the end of the war ten men from our two nearby communes died in Germany in the labor camps.

The war permeated everyone’s life. My other guests, Pierre-Yves and Marylen were living in Paris and Burgundy respectively, both in Occupied France, and as young kids, they were terrorized by the sight of the Nazis. Marylen said she saw them every day because they took up their headquarters across the street from her family home.

Pierre-Yves, as an eight-year old, was on the last train to leave Paris before the Germans marched in. His mother, younger brother, and he fled to Brittany’s western coast. They stayed in a hotel room for a few weeks until his mother decided that she would rather be taking her chances in Paris than to be confined to a small room with two boys indefinitely. I asked Pierre-Yves, “But didn’t you have trouble finding enough food to eat in Paris?” His eyes got very wide and round and the agitation of the old memory was visible across his face and he said with great force, “Why yes, we had hardly any food. At times we WERE starving.” It was obvious that sixty years of plentiful food have not been enough to erase his memories of childhood deprivation. Now, I have a slightly better understanding of why age-old animosities fueled by occupation and war are impossible to extinguish. I guess that’s why Hamas and Sien Fein insisting on fighting against what seem to be insurmountable odds.

Today, the rose vines covering the house where the murdered seamstress once lived are blooming beautifully. It’s a sunny, hot day. Saturday bicyclists stop and fill their bottles up at the natural springs where she was shot. Life goes on and I am reminded that I'm just a speck of flotsam on the ocean of history.

Update: Therese came over yesterday with a grape basket full of carrot greens for the rabbit. I had to break the news to her that the cat ate him.