The War: Part II

My Aunt’s Souvenirs reflect the strange trajectory of memories passed back and forth within families over time. Francoise was too young during the war to be writing in 2008 from direct personal memory; many of the details she recounts with such acuity had to have been the result of post-war conversations with my mother rather than her direct experience.  She could have been forgiven for reporting impressionistic and subjective memories of the war, but turned out to be a crackerjack researcher – plowing through old letters and photos, and plumbing the memories of myriad cousins and friends. And though I fancied myself to have inherited an encyclopedic understanding of family history from my mother, what stuck with me far more over the years were the emotional arcs to her stories, and the egotistical conviction of a writer that I had an idea what it felt like to be her then.

At the beginning of the war, my mother’s routine was little changed. After school came homework, playing with her little sister, helping with dinner and cleaning up, putting her sister to bed, then more homework. Perhaps she might read a popular novel before going to sleep, half-listening to the low voices of her parents in the other room, worrying about what would happen to France when the Germans invaded.  I’m sure she always listened for the opinion of Roger during these discussions, but she found it hard to be too worried. .“I was young, I was a teenager – you don’t think about death or even danger. You think you will live forever.”  

In May 1940, “la drole de guerre” was over. Germany invaded, and the exode from the north flooded  the south with refugees. Most returned, but those who could – particularly Jews – bribed their way into remaining in the south. There were a few new faces in the Sancta Maria Pensionnat, girls who had to concentrate when reciting prayers, as if they’d just learned them. Rationing came soon after, and as Germany plundered the French economy, the lack of food seemed to be all anyone talked about.

Years later, I heard the wry joke about the life of a worker under communism: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Somehow it seemed familiar to me, I think because I’d heard of a similar sentiment echoed by my mother about meals during the war.  “They pretend to feed us and we pretend to eat.”  You had to be resourceful not to starve. My mother learned, when walking through Avignon, to keep her eyes peeled for a line that might be forming and get on it, regardless if she knew what was being sold . If she were lucky, she might bring home some powdered milk or some vegetables - sometimes even, farmers unloaded bagful of rabbits in an alley. Francoise remembers the miracles her mother managed in the kitchen with so little to work with – but the hunger, she doesn’t remember. She surmises that everyone made sure she had her fill, and I am quite certain Simone often lied about not being as hungry as she was to make sure of it.

  Because of the cuts to the power and water supply that occurred often, my grandmother came up with ingenious ways to cook with very little fuel, and of course every bit of water was recycled three times at least.  (These habits came in handy at our summer home in the Berkshire years later, when we had a limited water supply.) But most impressive was Jeanne’s improvisation during the bombings that began in 1943. As my grandfather’s store was over a thick basement of limestone bedrock, all the neighbors gathered there as well as the Chabals, and someone had to figure out little systems to make things go right – or in case things went wrong.  Jeanne rigged a cord attached to a bell at street level, that could be pulled to alert rescuers in case they were trapped under collapsed rubble.  In the shelter itself she was always knitting, a habit my mother picked

up which I always considered her personal meditation,  her form of self-soothing. (These five red sweaters define the winter of 62-63 for us.)

The bombings were forever imbedded into my mother’s future political DNA. There has been no military conflict in the world since when she hasn’t thought first and foremost of the toll on the civilian population. I know all of her children inherited a similar perspective.  I was so personally fascinated by her experience in the war that my first short story was about the French underground – although I took it a bit literally, probably because I conflated it with my mother being literally under the ground during the bombing.

In late 1942, Roger felt she was old enough to understand the reasons why girls who had been  suspected of masquerading as Catholics were disappearing from her school. He told her there were terrible rumors that trains going east that were coming back empty.  He probably knew more but held back from spelling things out. She was a 16-year old girl who could do very little, after all. After the war, the fate of her Jewish classmates weighed heavily on her . “I breathed the same air as these girls” she told me. (She read obsessively about the holocaust later in life, a habit that didn’t help with her insomnia, just as it doesn't help with mine.)

In 1944, my grandmother was forced to spend more time in a sanitarium as her tuberculosis got worse. Francoise, like many of the children of Avignon, was sent to a school in the country to be safe from the bombings.  Roger was lying low with the family of his fiancée in the Auvergne region, and my mother, alone in Avignon with her father, was stretched thin. She had to run the house, cook for Marcel, scramble to find food and do her best to see her sister and her mother as often as she could in the face of deteriorating train service. Her favorite aunts, Marguerite and Claire, stayed close. And though schools closed with the bombings, she remained in touch with two former teachers, Janine Lesbros and Cecile Godin. (Everyone thought of them as spinster-roommates, but it was clear as day to me when I met them as an adult they were life partners.) Janine was the niece of Alfred Lesbros, a painter who now has some renown in the south of France, (and three of whose pieces my mother owns), and Cecile was way more cool than anyone should have been teaching in a strict Catholic school. The pair was to play a very important role in my mother’s life, and these letters from Cecile after two of the heaviest allied bombing raids on Avignon (which she witnessed from outside the city at St. Pierre de Vassol) speak to their closeness.
 

Chère Simone:

I’m still overwhelmed by what I heard this morning, having witnessed the horrible spectacle from afar. We heard the sirens of Carpentras, saw the planes and the bombs falling from them, and felt the earth shake all the way to here. We were fairly sure it was indeed Avignon that had been bombed. You can imagine how worried we were. Ma Simone, how fearsome it must have been, even in your shelter! Janine decided to go to Carpentras [by bicycle no doubt], and there she was assured that the targets were the Vouland factory, the suspension bridge and the train station. Nothing too close to the rue des Marchands, but I am still worried. Please send word as soon you can....

Cecile

There is another from her dated almost a month later. Clearly my mother had not only been fine, but managed to send an impossibly luxurious gift.

Ma chère:

Oh Simone, the spiced roll was so delectable! You can’t imagine with what savagery we threw ourselves upon it, after just having finished a meal of 4 potatoes and a meager spoonful each of noodles! We are wild animals and dying of hunger! And here you are, sweet Simone, so adorable to deprive yourself of the tastiest bread ever consumed! But you are forbidden to do it again! You cannot. 
I did not write yesterday because the latest bombing rather upset me – it seemed to be one of the heaviest yet. We heard felt the ground moving. There is no news from Avignon yet. [Most radios had been confiscated by the Germans.] Oh mon pauvre chou, that you are living through such a thing.  I know perhaps you are getting used to it, but still.
Cécile.

One bomb did destroy the house of a great-aunt, though no one was killed. My mother helped clear the rubble for days.

As you can tell, my mother inspired a great deal of affection. In fact, meeting the first of many lifelong friends in 1943 was one of the bright spots in a time when just laughing entre amis must have almost felt like a small act of sabotage.

MCO 2015