Their Unsung Sacrifice
A footnote in WW2 history that changed the course of the war.
Here, the sprawling forest still bears witness to war, its floors scarred by bomb craters, inflicted three quarters of a century ago.
Here, in one of the rooms of the small cottage I now call home, a German soldier left his mark — a large mural, a cartoonish graffiti of tankard-wielding friars, with a Gothic caption at the bottom proclaiming: “Boozing is what we worship”.
And near the house, at the edge of the forest, surrounded by the shelled remains of workshops and bunkers, sits a V1 ramp and its missile, aimed at London.
What was “worshipped” here was deadly.
“Here” is Normandy, a small village of some two hundred souls, thirty miles
from the coast, and roughly one hundred and twenty miles from the D-day landing beaches.
Here, a little-know part of the war caught ordinary people in its deadly maelstrom, and if not for their sacrifice, the war would’ve cost untold more civilian lives, and possibly have taken a very different turn.
These people suffered in silence.
Their story needed to be told.
Why?
At the end of the war people cried out “never again, never forget”. But we do forget. We are forgetting, at this very moment, when roughly 66 percent of millennials haven’t got a clue what Auschwitz was about, and most people ignore that Hitler came to power through a democratic process, and only then perverted it, from the inside, through lies and fraud, into a ruthless, totalitarian regime feeding on people’s fears and tribal instincts.
We all know what happened next, but how many of us understand why it happened? Worse, how many of our future politicians and world leaders will still understand and act accordingly? It’s time to stop electing politicians who are ignorant of basic history or willing to abuse it.
That’s why this story still needs to be told.
People say history repeats itself. Let’s be clear: it does not! ‘Repeat’ is a verb that implies action, and history is an abstract that cannot act. But man acts, and man repeats. Seventy six years ago, we ended a war, and put democracy on the rails, to a better future for humanity. We ended a war, but we forgot to end its primary cause — that deep-rooted, primal, ethnic tribalism still lurking in all of us. Look around you, read the news, and read critically, dare to compare sources before you make up your mind. And when you read up on history, always check who wrote it, when did he write it, and why. All too often, history gets rewritten by the latest victor; it’s called propaganda.
Man manipulates history, man repeats history, and all of his worst mistakes, because he fails to truly learn and change.
So I decided to remember, and share in writing.
Fascinated by the German soldier’s mural and the nearby V1 site, I researched the military presence in the area, the history behind Germany’s secret rocket programme, the construction of the hundreds of V1 sites scattered along the French coast. I started talking to some of the elderly villagers, the last reluctant witnesses, and slowly gained their confidence. From them I learned about the Russian and Polish slave labourers, arriving in cattle trains in the dead of night, thousands of emaciated ghosts to construct the V1 bases, with many of them entering their final ‘dead of night’.
I remembered how my mother, during my late teens and early adulthood, would hint at her wartime suffering and deprivations whenever I was being selfish or too demanding. Now, I went to her, I needed to know, and she finally told me in full, the story of a twelve-year-old girl, fleeing the German onslaught in 1940.
She and her family, together with hundreds of thousands of others, took to the road, and they paid the toll, in blood.
And finally, there were the whispered stories, always brief and brushed aside with a shrug, of my wife’s grandparents helping to hide downed pilots, counterfeiting passports and food stamps, under the very noses of the enemy they were forced to cohabitate with.
After the war, none of these people ever sought the limelight. They kept their stories to themselves, memories too raw and painful to share. None of them saw themselves as heroes; none of them were soldiers; but they all fought through the war in their small and different ways.
They rose above their tribes of colour and creed.
Over the past few years, all of the above finally coalesced into a story that needed to be told, a story dark and spare, a harsh reality without heroics or romance; the story of two friends, an ethnic German and a Pole, separated by Nazi ideology, and a twelve-year-old French boy who was not like other boys, struggling to come to terms with the cruelty and absurdity of war. If you are interested in reading my novel, Listen To The Colours, leave me a note and I’ll get in touch, or go to my website to read the first chapters by clicking the novel’s cover.
Thank you, to all of you who take the time to read my poetry and stories.
