Old people & murder & WWII
I saw a post about women confessing to offing step-fathers and abusive spouses, where this did not belong. But, I had an old person confess murder to me once and that post reminded me.
When I was 19 I went to France for a summer session at a language school in Vichy. In WWII, Vichy was the Nazi capital of occupied France.
My host parents forbade us to discuss WWII at table. I got the impression they'd kept their heads down in those yrs & felt ashamed. Also, when I was staying there our group of students included girls from Germany, Japan, the US, Sweden, China, and Spain. There were a variety of perspectives. I guess after years of keeping students, they'd had dinner table talk get too spicy a time or two. Not a problem, really. When I was 19, WWII wasn't a major interest of mine.
One of my classes was events/conversational. We parsed the morning radio news headlines & struggled through slang and cliches doggedly. One day, we were sent out and told to find someone and ask about Vichy and WWII.
Most classmates got jokey responses or got told that the person was too busy to chat, but good luck with that. I, on the other hand, got a murder confession.
I sat down on a park bench with an old man and told him about my assignment. He shot me a look and asked if I really wanted to know. I told him my dad served in Europe in WWII (I'm a late in life child), so I'd already heard some about it. The old man told me he served in WWII, too. He was in the Resistance in Vichy. And at the end of the War, he celebrated the good news by killing a German soldier. He told me it wasn't the right one, but they killed his mama so one of them had to pay. I asked about his mom and he said she wasn't a very good cook but he missed her bad food. And sometimes when he ate something that didn't taste very good he cried for her.
