Some more tidbits from my grandmother’s WWII diaries which did not fit in the last post:
she got a secretary job for the railway service because she had heard that was a good place to help the Resistance, and indeed she was soon contacted to leak train schedules (so Resistants could sabotage freight & ammunition trains going to Germany) and administrative info to help people escape deportation. She writes that she hopes it’s “a little bit of help” and that it will sound “more formidable when I talk about it later—in reality it is almost mundane, not at all like what you read about in books”, and she often feels like she is “playing pretend”
This sentiment comes back a lot at the beginning of her war journal, a kind of surreal feeling, almost impostor’s syndrome, like she can’t take herself seriously as a person living through a war. In 1940 she tries to enter the “forbidden zone” where her former house is, to salvage some items before the house is looted, and a German soldier offers her a lift so she won’t have trouble with the sentries. She refuses, and he sighs and says in bad French “Malheur, la guerre.” (“War—what grief.”) She writes that she had this impression again, that they were all “playing war”, playing a role, and everyone felt weird about it
her fiancé (my grandfather) was among the young men planting bombs on railway tracks to derail freight trains, and he would occasionally steal from a wagon (having no compunction about it as it was stuff the Nazis had stolen) and she & her sister would find an excuse to go out so they could all open the “surprise barrel” together. They thought it was a lot of fun as they never knew what the contents would be—sometimes food, sometimes a barrel full of wine, and once they found items from the looting of a church: crucifixes, rosaries, prayer books and the relic of a saint. She mentions it several times in her diary afterwards, always quite wryly, “We’ve had 52 alerts in 3 days, it’s exhausting having to run to the basement so many times every night, but I know we’re safe, for we have my bone of Saint What’s-His-Name”
1941 is the first time she writes that she feels like she is “living through a chapter of history”, and it’s because she started using old bicycle tyres to make new soles for her shoes, and unravelling wool jumpers to mix the yarn colours and knit “new” jumpers, which “are things you’d read about in books about war.” She gives a jumper to each of her sisters, who are happy about it and say it feels like they are really getting new clothes, and she comments “Nous voilà devenues des héroïnes de Victor Hugo” (“We’ve now become Victor Hugo characters”)
I love the amount of times she compares her life to books—when her fiancé, who was about to be deported for forced labour in Germany, changes his identity and tries to escape to the unoccupied zone (the South of France) and then to Morocco, hoping she can join him later in Casablanca, she is very anxious but also notes how strange it feels to even write these words, which seem right out of a novel.
she was nearly 20 (in 1940) the first time her mother allowed her fiancé to visit her at home (they had to stay in the kitchen, with a chaperone) after he came saying he brought his stamp book to trade stamps with her. They have fun calling each other Monsieur and Mademoiselle again, as was proper (they had long switched to using first names when their parents weren’t around); her fiancé confesses to her that he spent weeks taking stamps off of any envelop he could get his hands on, to improvise a stamp collection so he had a wholesome excuse to visit her at home. She finds the idea brilliant. They do not end up trading stamps, seeing as the “chaperone” is her older sister Geneviève who kindly spends the whole hour “very busy looking for something in the pantry”
at one point she writes bitterly that she queued up nearly the entire day at a grocery shop that was supposed to still have some chocolate and coffee, as she & her sisters were desperate for either. Instead the only things she was given in exchange for her ration tickets were one fourth of a loaf of bread, a small packet of washing soda and a “hat so shapeless you can hardly tell it is a béret”. She writes that her little sister Simone didn’t even fight her for the béret, “voilà à quel point il est laid” (“that’s how ugly it is.”)
she is interrogated by the Nazis again in 1942 and starts to fear that she is about to get caught leaking all this info about transits to Germany, so she goes to the regional director of the train service (who lives in her street) for help. He tells her that trusting him was very dangerous, “What makes you think I’m not an informer?” and she says “Sir you only have one arm. You are a disabled WWI veteran so I assumed you weren’t too fond of Germans.” She then writes: “Je tremblais en entrant dans la pièce. J’aimerais être de ces filles hardies…!” (“I was shaking as I entered the room. I wish I were one of these daring girls…!”)
(One of the very few pictures taken of her during the war)
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