The recent story about a swastika popping up at the Sidwell Friends School got me to thinking once again how much recent history has apparently been utterly forgotten, and how young people in this country and elsewhere need to learn about the crimes and atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany if we are to prevent repeating that disaster. Then, Greg Dworkin included this item in this morning’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup:
The girl who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars dies aged 92
A World War II heroine who used her harmless appearance to gain the trust of Nazis before executing them has died in The Netherlands, aged 92.
Freddie Oversteegen was born in Haarlem, near Amsterdam on September 6, 1925 and raised by her communist mother.
She was just 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, the Daily Mail reports.
Together with her older sister Truus and their friend Hannie Schaft, she blew up bridges and railway tracks with dynamite, smuggled Jewish children out of concentration camps and executed as many Nazis as she could, using a firearm hidden in the basket of her bike.
These accounts have stirred up family stories about life under Nazi subjugation, and I’m feeling the urge to tell some of them.
If it had not been for World War II, I would never have been born. My father, a GI, met my mother, a French girl, in 1945 as the war was coming to an end. I’ve told this part of the story before. My mother was almost exactly the same age as Freddie Oversteegen, but without the calling to become a Resistance fighter (though my French grandfather was in the Resistance). As you might imagine, with a certain regularity, she would tell stories of what life was like during those times. Come below the fold to read more.
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My mother was 14 when the Germans invaded France. Lyon was nominally in the “free” portion of France, but this seemed not to have made much difference. According to her, the French called the German troops les doryphore (Japanese beetles) because they were everywhere. Violating the law, my mother’s family listened to the BBC broadcast every night.
France has always been a country with plentiful food resources, but after the Germans arrived, food disappeared. The best of everything was transported back to Germany. Through the war years, my mother said their main meal consisted of rutabaga stew, every single day. (It will come as no surprise that she wanted nothing to do with rutabagas after the war.) Sugar, coffee and milk were rationed. Young people her age were allowed about a pint of milk per week. The quality of the rationed coffee was so bad it was barely worth drinking.
Until the 1980s, I didn’t realize that Lyon had been a hub of activity for the French Resistance. The head of the Gestapo in Lyon was named Klaus Barbie, nicknamed the Butcher of Lyon. He personally tortured captives of the Nazis, including the Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Barbie was held responsible for the deaths of 14,000 people. After the war, he became an asset for the CIA, and then escaped to Bolivia until 1983, when he was brought back to France for trial. He died in prison in 1991.
My grandfather was also a member of the Resistance, though not a leader. In 1944, while he was at a meeting at a cafe, the Gestapo rolled up and started shooting. My grandfather was shot, and his injury contributed to his death the following year at the age of 41.
In the last year of her life, my mother told me a story about living under Nazi occupation that she had never told before. She said she was running an errand for her parents, visiting someone in a different part of the city from where she lived. During her visit, they heard the Nazis coming down the street, so they went to the window to watch what was happening. The Nazis went into a dairy and pulled out the man who owned it and his family. They set fire to the dairy and shot the man in front of his family. Then they left. The whole experience horrified my mother, and after she returned home, she screamed about what she saw—which was not a safe thing to do. If a collaborator had heard her, she could have been arrested, and possibly the rest of the family, too.
My godmother survived even more harrowing experiences during the occupation. She had been a childhood friend of my mother’s. Like my mother, she immigrated to the US after the war, and sometime after that, she managed to track down my mother, after which they resumed their friendship. While my mother was rather mild-mannered, my godmother was a headstrong woman who lived her life her way without apologies. I don’t quite know how or why—she might have had connections with the Resistance as well—she stole a pass stamp from the Nazis, and she got caught. She was sent to a prison camp where she spent the next 18 months. Conditions at the camp were filthy and cold. They were always hungry. She described how the prisoners were required to stand at attention for hours, to the point where she just had to pee where she was standing. She was beaten and suffered injuries. She left the camp on a stretcher under the protection of the Red Cross.
More than 40 years later, my mother told me about a phone conversation she had had with my godmother. My godmother had called her up weeping. My godmother said that it would have been her son’s 43rd birthday. As far as anyone had known, she had had three daughters—no son. It turned out that when she was sent to the prison camp, she was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy, but under the conditions of the camp, he did not survive for long. My godmother had told no one about this baby, not even her husband, but under the duress of years of silence and grief, she opened up to my mother, who then opened up to me.
Now, I am reading Gabe Ortiz’ diaries about how imprisoned pregnant refugee women in this country are losing their babies, and I can’t help but think about my godmother. The criminals who currently control the levers of power in this country have instituted a system for treatment of refugees that, in practice, too much resembles the system of prison camps instituted by the Nazis. It makes me, the son of an immigrant, so angry I can hardly see straight, and yet, after the shock of learning what was happening last summer, this horror has turned into just one more thing Trump is doing.
Violent hate groups, Nazis and the Klan, have undergone an unprecedented resurgence since Trump’s rise. The grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these idiot (for the most part) young people fought to end the scourge of Nazism; these new Nazis have utterly forgotten the sacrifice of their forebears. They have abandoned plain human decency. I don’t understand the desire to apply raw power to get what you want, or the demonization of those different from you to the point of genocide.
While my family suffered during World War II, many millions more suffered much worse: the seven million Jews who were systematically murdered in the camps; civilian populations who were bombed and shot at, either deliberately or accidentally; ordinary soldiers who were killed or maimed. In some ways, my family was quite lucky, but everyone who lived through the occupation of Europe by the Nazis was scarred by it in some way. And none of it ever had to happen. An election went wrong in one place, and someone won who ought to have been kept as far as possible from any measure of power.
The nation is in crisis, and while the new House majority is pressing administration officials on their transgressions, the transgressions continue. Particularly with the resurgence of hate groups, it’s not clear that this nation will become whole again anytime soon.
Sorry to be so heavy tonight, but this has been weighing on my mind. Now to lighter fare: the comments!
Top Comments (March 13, 2019):
From by elenacarlena:
ProgressiveFirst's comment in liberalMedStudent's diary struck me as an excellent summation. We are more powerful coming together on all our issues than fighting over which is the most important.
From Tamar:
Here’s a great comment by Elwood Dowd in response to story, recounted in Jen Hayden’s post, about right wing young nut/idiot Jacob Wohl faking the threats he received, using a fake twitter account he himself created.
Highlighted by durrati:
This comment by libra nos from duratti’s latest LOLfest.
Top Mojo (March 12, 2019):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (March 12, 2019):
Tonight’s picture quilt is courtesy of jotter!