The mother of a dear friend of mine, here, in the South of France, was six and living in Bordeaux when the Germans invaded that part of France.
She very recently wrote a moving testimony of her experiences as a child, during the German occupation and the liberation of France.
I translated it in English because, frankly, my first impression upon reading it was: "Is this how we are perceived in Iraq?" and the answer, which breaks my heart, is all too likely, "Yes, it is."
And now, Eve Viaud's account under the fold:
I was just six years old, when I first heard the word "war" but I did not understand what it meant. Every evening, the members of my family, their faces reflecting their anxiety, met around the radio to listen to the news of the front. "The French speak to the French." Every morning at school I sang: "Maréchal, here we are! Before you the savior of France, again you gave us hope. The Motherland will return...".
At school, our class doubled in size. The new arrivals, from the occupied zone, told us that their families had left behind everything they owned and taken to the road under the "bombardments," another new word.
I started to realize that this "war" was not a game like those we played during break, when Mom, like many others, replacing the men who had died at the front or had been made prisoners, was forced to take a harsh factory work. It manufactured bombs and shells.
One morning, our mothers at the school with a crazy look on their faces. They shouted: "They are there! Oh God, they are here!" My Mom, in a panic, dragged me by the hand to make me run faster, and while crying, she repeated: "They will kill us, they will kill us all." That's when I saw who "they" were. Marching in a single line, their rifle on their shoulders, boots adorned with hand grenades, wearing ammunition belt for light machine guns, the German soldiers advanced slowly, carefully, on the two sides of the main street.
They advanced, scanning the street corners, ready to draw fire on the first silhouette they might see. Like a rat pack in khaki-colored uniforms, they invaded my neighborhood. I went to hide under the stairs, so afraid I was.
A few days after the arrival of the German soldiers, I began to really understand the meaning of war: One of my Mom's uncles rode by our house on his bicycle. He was going to work and waves at us as he went by. At the street corner, helmeted German soldiers, wearing visors, boots and long gray green coats, shouted: "Halt!" Unfortunately, my uncle was born deaf and continued on his way. The punishment was swift: a burst of machine-gun fire laid him down on the ground. I remained horrified in front of his lifeless body. A large pool of bloodstain appeared around him. I wanted to shout, but my mother put her hand on my mouth for me to stop me. She held me very tightly in her arms and pushed me inside the house, while murmuring: "What a tragedy! Poor France! Poor us!" My grandmother, behind the window, between two sobs, cursed God to allow such a infamy.
Everything became forbidden, no one dared be caught chatting in the streets. We were not to listen to the radio. The men in khaki even killed all the pigeons on the roofs. Our doctor was forbidden to look after us. So that his patients understand the full nature of the threat, he showed us the yellow star sown on the back of its jacket. To make me grasp the deadly seriousness of these new laws, my parents explained to me that the soldiers would kill us all, they insisted on "all," if I spoke about the radio or told anyone that good Doctor Schinazi still came to look after my brother. For more safety, and to insure my silence, they took me to see the camp where, behind steel barbed wire, the Germans had locked up the Jews, the Communists, the Gypsies... and the parents of little girls who spoke too much. I understood.
Each day brought new restrictions, new fears. We learned to experience ration cards, soap, coal, wood, food shortages... The restriction of freedoms became increasingly heavy. We no longer had the right to leave our homes in the evening after curfew, and we were to turn off all lights. A great majority of the population accepted the Germans' yoke and tried to survive, after a fashion. Those who refused were found and arrested by the French and German police. The prison camps were becoming too full, so the Germans built a new railway line and, every day, convoys full of men and women left towards an unknown destination.
It is at that time that I discovered the song of the air-sirens. It remained, throughout the war, the lugubrious prelude to fear and the vision of death. When this brutal call sounded, generally at night, we all piled up under the stone stairs. Above our heads, the low humming of the bombers was very quickly followed by the rapid, heavy fire of anti-aircraft guns. Then came the whistles from the bombs, and the explosions... The ground trembled, the furniture moved... Heartlessly, these bombs robbed us one by one of all the houses of the neighborhood. We remained huddled for long hours, stiff with cold and fear. When the alarm ended, our first words with the neighbors who had made it were: "Thank God you made it! We were so lucky! It was Hell to night!" The streets were filled with craters, the grown-ups cleared away the rubble of their broken homes. Parents, crazy with pain, sought bodies in the debris.
But the most terrible remained to come. The Germans, who saw the victory escaping their grasp, became increasingly savage. Their supply convoys were being harassed by the men of the Maquis, so it was the time of the hostages and the reprisals. Acting on order from Hitler, the Wehrmacht applied the terrible code of hostages: the execution of one hundred people for each German killed in an attack. For me, they were no longer Germans, but the Boches. War, which changes everything and everyone, even children, stole the most beautiful years of my childhood and taught me hatred. At age ten, I wanted to kill. And then, one day, at mid-day, the sky became dark with Allied planes which dropped 85 tons of bombs! It was a flood of fire and blood. At the end of the raid, we saw that the camp of the Boches had been totally destroyed. Trucks loaded with their mutilated corpses passed in front of us. I was delighted by these men's deaths. The darkness of war had filled my child's heart with hatred and killed its sensitivity.
I endured this trial from age six to ten. Sixty-five years later, my memory is still capable of bringing back to life this period forever cursed with the odor of death, fire, tragedy and destruction. Nobody can live through such times unscathed. I am always afraid of a new war. If only everyone entertained the same fears! It is difficult to make these memories of horror tangible to one's own children. And if I write this, it is so that they understand why, even though I'm now more than 70-years old, I still protest against war. With time, the scars disappear. But, today, a flame of anger still shines in my eyes when I hear of war.
Eve Viaud.