Growing up in a war zone

My mother in law is French. I asked her to tell me what it was like growing up during the Occupation. She sat back in her chair, drawing a crocheted afghan up and tucking it snugly across her body and under her legs. “Oh, I don’t like to be cold,” she shivered. “I was so cold all the time during the war. There wasn’t a warm building in all of Paris during the Occupation, even for the German soldiers. I’ve never forgotten how hard that was.”

At eighty three years of age, her French accent is as distinct as it was when she arrived in America as a war bride so many years ago - and her memory of those bleak years is still  strong and colored with vivid detail.

Jacqueline's early life was greatly affected by the rapid advance of the German army in WWII through France.  As the German war machine spilled westward beyond Paris, young Jacqueline was sent to stay on a relative’s farm outside of Paris. It wasn’t too long, however, before the German soldiers began to show up at such farms.  Jacqueline remembers her first view of the feared Boches.  "One day some German soldiers came to the farm and commandeered a team of my uncle’s Percheron horses for the German army.  That was my first sight of a German soldier in uniform.  One of the soldiers gave my brother and I some candy - which we promptly threw on the manure pile.  After all, we had been told that, in World War I, the Germans poisoned little children this way!”

There was no heat in the bedroom that Jacqueline and her brother shared. They quickly discovered a way to get warm at night. "We each had a bed, and there was a barrel of Calvados (apple brandy) at the foot of Jean Claude's bed.  We would sneak sugar cubes from the kitchen at night and let some of the Calvados drip from the tap onto the cubes.  This is called ‘petit canard'  (little duck) by the Normans.  We would suck on the sugar cubes and it didn't take long for the Calvados to warm us as we crawled into bed. “

As the German soldiers began roaming the countryside, demanding food and liquor from the Norman farmers, it became apparent that life on the farm was no safer than living in the city. Jacqueline and her brother were reunited with their family in Paris.

One thing that stands out in Jacqueline's recollections of Paris is how so much of her life was influenced by the German occupation and then the liberation.  It is difficult for anyone not experiencing the daily presence and always ominous threat of the hated Germans to understand what it was like.  There was no “freedom of speech" or any of the other freedoms that we take for granted and no civil liberties except as permitted by the German occupiers.  Everything was geared to what the Germans demanded.

 Jacqueline remembers one aspect of the occupation very distinctly - "la Gale du Pain".  “The only bread available at that time was a dark brown, very coarse bran-filled loaf, with many bits of straw baked in, some pieces almost one inch long! Because of chronic food shortages and the tight rationing, this coarse bread was a large part of a typical Parisian diet,” she recalls. “Because of this excessive roughage, many, many Parisians, and I mean by the thousands, developed this itchy skin condition which they called "the bread rash" (la gale du pain).”

Jacqueline described the treatment.  "We would be taken to l'Hospital Bicétre.  There, we would be separated, males and females, and then told to strip. First we would be thoroughly washed, then the nurses would brush us with rough bristled brushes which would open all of the sores.  Then they would use large paint brushes to apply an ointment all over our bodies.  Thousands of people went through these 'mass production' treatment lines every day.  After we got dressed again, we would go home, riding on the subway.  In the subway we could tell who else had just been to the hospital. Everyone smelled of this strong la gale ointment odor!"

Rationing, food shortages, coffee made from chicory and maybe even sawdust, filth and disease -- there was no one to complain to about all this.  But somehow, like all the other French, Jacqueline and her family survived. “When I hear young people these days complain about not having enough money or toys,” she smiles “I often wish they could go back in the past for just one week to live during the Occupation, then they would realize how lucky they are.”