Those Who Forget by Géraldine Schwarz

Author:Géraldine Schwarz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Papi died when I was ten years old, and unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to learn more. But a family friend named Claude, who was born in 1929, offered to tell me how he had lived during that time of war and occupation. Claude grew up in a family that was much more comfortable than my mother’s, in a house with a large garden and a garage for the car, located only twenty minutes from Paris. His family was very anti-German. His grandfather had already mobilized twice against German invasions of France, in 1870 and 1914, and three of his uncles had been drafted in World War I. Like many of their comrades, they never talked about what they had been through in the trenches, those lines of defense hollowed out of the ground and linked together over hundreds of miles, where soldiers on both sides waited for death to come over them at any moment, from any direction. France had been greatly weakened by the war, morally, demographically, and economically. People cried “Never again!” and called it “the war to end all wars!”

Twenty years later, Europe was back at it. “I definitely felt the war coming,” said Claude, who was ten in 1939. “There were mobilization posters everywhere, and we stuck strips of paper to the windows to muffle vibrations from the bombings. At school, they distributed gas masks, which made an impression on me.” In the end, the area where he lived was mostly spared by bombs, but one of his friends who lived in Paris told him about the dead and wounded who lined the streets. “In May 1940, as the Wehrmacht approached, my parents decided to flee, we closed the house, leaving the cat and the dog. The roads were very crowded, everyone was afraid of the Germans and fled.” They took refuge in a relative’s beautiful villa at the mouth of the Loire. One month later, German officers requisitioned the attic of the house. “They were perfectly well behaved. This attitude was very reassuring to the French, and most people who had fled went back home, as did my family.”

Confronted with the complete rout of the French army, which was considered one of the strongest in the world, the French state called on Marshal Philippe Pétain, a World War I military hero, to come to the rescue. Pétain called for surrender. In response, General de Gaulle broadcast his legendary “Appeal of 18 June” from the BBC in London, calling on French people to continue the fight, cementing this act as the foundation of the resistance movement, the Free French Forces. Four days later, Pétain signed an armistice with Adolf Hitler that arranged for France to be divided in two. The French had to pay for the cost of the German Occupation, and agreed, in a first step toward losing the country’s moral integrity, to “deliver any German and Austrian political refugees present on its land.” The new French government left Paris and moved to Vichy in the southern “free zone.

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