The War: Part III

My mother received her baccalaureate in 1943, and honors in English and Math, I think. (She was actually equally strong in both – had it been more culturally acceptable for a young woman, she told me once might have become a Math Professor instead of a French teacher.
Getting your BAC already put you in a minority of French students, leaving the student where an American might find herself after two years of college. The next level of academics was the funnily-named Khâgne, comparable to the last two years at an Ivy league school, ending with a License (BA) or with an extra year, a Maitrise (Master’s). 

There was a modest orientation on the first day, and two girls slid into next to my mother in the very first row, Gaby and Claudine. They were three bien-elevées young women, each of whom thought the other two were a bit better off than they themselves were (a little tidbit I discovered years later.) All the new girls had to suffer some hazing, called “bizutage.” From what I could gather from my mother’s account, it was fairly tame as these things go (like having to sharpen all the pencils of the older girls, which was done with a little pocket knife one expressly carried for the task), but I daresay it was thrilling to be ordered around by one’s peers, rather than suffocated by one’s parents or barked at by German soldiers. So this is what 17 felt like! 
Considering the next 70 years, documented by boxes and boxes of letters, (Claudine ended up in London, Gaby in Paris, and Simone in the United States of course) it seems far more fate than coincidence that these three girls walked into the hall and down the steps together, exchanging names and histories as if they known each other since grade school. (I daresay they used “vous” with each other at first, after all elles n’avaient pas élevées les cochons ensembles -- they hadn’t raised the pigs together.)   

Unfortunately the beginning of school coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the Allied bombings of 43-44, and classes were very often interrupted. Gaby and Claudine both took the train in from Nîmes, and those were increasingly commandeered by Germans. In fact, years later, Claudine told me a story she asked to keep to myself until after her death. (We became close friends and of our own accord as adults).

“I often took a shortcut that brought me behind the tracks, and one day I saw a train pull in with German soldiers riding on top of it. I thought it strange that they would be guarding livestock, because these were windowless cars designed to transport cattle, but I figured with the food shortages it might make some sense. Then I noticed the corner of each car had a square for ventilation, and just as soon, to my horror, I realized there were eyes staring out from behind the wire. Human beings were being transported. I was transfixed and terrified at the same time. When the train pulled out, I had a thought that shames me to this day. I prayed that whoever was inside the cars had done some very bad things to deserve to be there.”

In August 1944, Allies landed on the lightly defended Mediterranean coast and marched quickly up the Rhone to fairly light resistance. Watching newsreels of the liberation of France in later years was an ambivalent experience for my mother, not because she remembered it as anything but the most welcome, euphoric time, but because her father forbade her to go into the street to greet the tanks. Whether he was wisely cautious or overly paranoid I don’t know, but he had a reason. One of the women in the buildings he rented was also a young brunette like my mother, and my grandfather was afraid Simone would be mistaken for her. You see, La Femme Piot was not exactly a respectable woman. A widow, her husband had been found floating in the Rhône, the rumored victim of the jealous lover she had on the side. What happened to him, I don’t know, but by wartime Madame Piot had a series of regular gentleman callers, one or more being a German officer. My grandfather knew she was at high risk for being plucked out of her apartment by the maquis fighters who followed the Americans into each city, replacing that happy parade with the grim march of female collaborators, swastikas painted on the shorn heads. 
I learned of this watching The World at War with my mother in 1973, which was on every Sunday night before Upstairs, Downstairs. “That was me,” she said, pointing to the ecstatic young women in the old footage, throwing flowers and being swept up in kisses by the equally ecstatic American and British infantry. And then, within less than a minute, she felt the need to correct herself. “Well, the day of liberation itself, I had to watch from a window.” Though I was fascinated by the story of the tenant of ill-repute that was the cause of her not being one of the first enthusiastic greeters, I could tell that my mother, these years later still felt a resentment toward her father. I’m sure the picnics she and her girlfriends (below) went on with some GI’s later on were in direct defiance of his wishes. 

 
 Of course it is impossible to look at these pictures and wonder if the winds of fate had blown just a bit more in one direction than the other, whether I’d be typing this with an entirely different set of paternal DNA. In any case, one can see a playful exuberance in some of these photos that would have been impossible under the occupation. (These photos are probably from the summer of 1945, after the war in Europe was finally over.)

In November of that year, about to turn 20, Simone was at church, and overcome by a headache so powerful she knew she had to leave immediately. In a blur of pain, she half-ran, half-staggered home. Probably alerted by a neighbor who saw her distress and ran ahead, she was greeted on the stairs by her father and immediate collapsed in his arms.

It was viral meningitis.

For weeks she literally hovered between life and death—even last rites were given. Her mother insisted on coming from the rest home to take care of her – a fact I’d never known until reading it in Francoise’s account. It probably saved her life. She couldn't keep anything down for weeks, but because it was her mother who asked, she eventually forced herself to take a few swallows of soup, and then a few more the next day. Considering how undernourished everyone was after the years of privation, it's truly miraculous that her body hung on. But love is a pretty miraculous thing, and it truly enveloped her, from her mother, her aunts, her father, Roger and his fiancée Annie. She’d adopted Simone as a sister from first they met, (just as her entire family would) and would gently sing at her bedside to sooth her. My mother mentioned her extraordinary tenderness many times.

After Roger placed 3rd nationwide in his aggregation exams, he and Annie were married. They probably would have delayed the ceremony until both Simone and Jeanne were stronger, but Roger and Annie were anxious to start a family. The war had thrown a wrench into the lives of every European, and there was an undeniable yearning to create a new generation that would have erase the cloud of death that still hung over the continent. (Indeed Mireille was born almost 10 months after the wedding, and four more followed in the next decade.)

Soon after the wedding my grandmother returned to the rest home, which was near Nice. There lived Tante Claire and her husband, and my mother stayed with them to recuperate. As often as she could muster the strength, she took the bus to the sanitarium in Grasse. They reversed the same roles of several months earlier, my mother bringing Jeanne soup, toweling her head, telling her often how much she loved her. This is how my mother took care of me whenever I was sick, of all of us. And exactly how we have just now taken care of her, my sisters and I, as she was dying.
 
 
In the 1980s, in New York, I surprised my mother with tickets to see the French singer so popular during the war, Charles Trenet. He was performing at Carnegie Hall As we walked back to Grand Central, where she would take a train back to Mount Vernon, my mother told me she’d been given a ticket to another concert of his, in Grasse, in April 1946, perhaps from her Oncle Paul. For a few hours she had a respite from the world outside, from her mother, from the exhaustion of the war. She remembers humming the tunes she’d just heard on the bus that brought her back to Tante Claire’s.
 
Her aunt was in front of the gate, watching for her niece, waiting to tell her her mother was dead.
 

This was the worst thing that could have happened to my mother, short of losing her brother or sister. But she could understand it. Anyone who has lost a parent very young can imagine what it was like though, for Francoise.

They thought there were doing the right thing by not taking her to the funeral, but this lack of closure, of sharing the grief with others, she later recognized as as something she needed terribly. She prayed and prayed for the return of her mother, having been taught all things were possible where Christ was involved. It is a testament to my own mother's love and education of Francoise that she turned into an extraordinary person despite these truly traumatic early years.  When we cried together on the phone before my mother died, she said: "You know, she was so much more than a sister to me."

In putting this together, I couldn't seem to find one picture of all five together - my grandparents, Roger, my mother and Francoise. I asked my aunt, and she had none either. So I put one together on using Photoshop. Somehow it seems right to put it here.


 MCO 2015

Don't forget to hit "older posts' for the last blog about Simone's life as a Chabal - "The End of the Beginning"