Urgent

In an earlier post, I wrote about Elisabeth Matthieu, who as a young nurse, risked her life with one of her friends to save the children of Etobon. They drove a truck with a piece of fabric marked with a red cross over the bed to Etobon, through artillery fire, loaded the children and then took them to the Swiss frontier. Jules Perret writes of the urgency of the mission.

Saturday, October 28, 1944

A note from the Red Cross for the evacuation of the children to Switzerland.  It’s urgent because the shelling is getting worse.  Dr. Rudy Rauch, that unwashed bear, is beginning to become human.  The reason?  He just moved in with a pretty lady with lovely hair, a refugee at Etobon, whose husband is at the front … French.  Some others are becoming more human, too, because they’re ashamed of the massacre in September.  At least, they realize they may be on the losing side and are looking for sympathy that might be useful when the final destruction comes.  An example:  they’ve given us three thirty-liter buckets for the 100 liters of milk that we have to deliver to them.  So 10 liters are left at the dairy.  And the interpreter says to me, “We’ll pay for 100 liters and you keep 10 that I’ll hide.  No use telling the colonel about this little irregularity.”

New orders:  be ready to send the snowplow out in bad weather from here to the Grille de Champagney; put piles of sand on the sides of the roads, in case of ice.

These idiots like schnapps better than vegetables!  They’ve deferred the transport of the potatoes so that the barrels can be put in place more quickly at the distillery near the school of the Vieille Verrière.  Drink the schnapps, messieurs les boches, drink!  The Americans will only get here more quickly.

Sunday, October 29

It’s ten o’clock.  I’m stretched out on the sofa, resting my knee.  There’s a nice fire.  Next to me, Aline, her head bandaged, Philippe;  Suzette comes and goes, Mama is making soup.  You could almost forget that it’s wartime, until you hear, outside, rough voices, the pounding of boots on the pavement, the sound of the German guns being taken away, the crashing of the American arrivals … You get used to everything… “Rest, much rest,” the Franco-Boche doctor Rauch-Deville has ordered.

Philippe says, “That’s Lucie’s gun.  That’s the Americans.”  And he’s only six!

This afternoon, Suzette and Aline went to Chenebier, where they were told more details of the drama.  They talked of the mayor, marching courageously at the head of the line, followed by René and eight others.  At that moment the thugs didn’t yet know where to conduct the killings.  They looked around, and finally decided on the church.  Manu says he saw, in the second group, Kuntz embracing Jacques, then getting into a car while a boche pushed Jacques, very pale, into the ranks of the condemned.  That’s what you get for being human and not killing prisoners …

The Germans are constantly interrogating the people of Etobon to try to find out where X is buried.  They often search, here and there, in the fields.  Ah!  If only the infamous Colonel Vonalt had known that it was I who buried him!

Yesterday, one of Morel’s sons, from the sawmill, came home with two Germans.  A shell whistled.  Morel hit the ground.  The Germans laughed.  Not for long.  The shell killed both of them.

I Dreamt of Jacques ...

The continued presence of their childrens' murderers caused unceasing pain to the Etobonais. Jules Perret identifies the guilty ones and their units even as he is forced to put up with them.

Monday, October 30

The chief of the Cossacks came to my house about some business of transporting wood in the forest. It was Blum, the ignoble and cruel captain who brutalized our children before handing them over to their executioners, who were taken from his own unit; this Blum is easy to identify because he’s missing the fingers on one hand.  I can’t walk from my bed to the living room, so Mama and Suzette received him.  A little while later, Suzette started crying, screaming, even, to me, “Papa!  We’ve endured everything!  When he saw some coffee on the table, this thug wanted us to give him a cup.  While he was drinking it, I saw his hand.  It had no fingers.  It was that monster!”  She was so enraged she couldn’t say more.  If she had had a gun, I think she would have killed him. 

The boche Ernst, who’s been staying here, has left.  Without a goodbye!  He can go to hell.  These last few days he spent his time looking for X’s grave.  Karl Lade must have told him that he was killed in a potato field, so that’s where he was looking.  If he only knew that I had hidden a picture of X in a hole in the wall!  Before he left, perhaps with the idea of pulling something out of me, he became revoltingly obsequious.  Monsieur Jules this, Monsieur Jules that:  “Rest yourself … would you like a cushion for your back? Etc., etc.”  The other boche, Henri, also exasperates me with his servility.

On all these abominable idiots, I note as many details as possible so that they can be found and punished:  this Ernst, like Vonalt, is from Regiment 406-75A.  Dr. Rauch is from Ambulance 622-44A.  The Cossacks, with their Blum, their lieutenant Kamerer, their adjutant Kartch and other crooks, are from the 15-201F.

As we await the rout, all the boches are extraordinarily active.  They do the impossible so that everything works as they wish, ceaselessly repairing their rolling stock, shaky, crumbling.  And things work, more or less.

I just had an interesting conversation with one of these boches, little, old, vain, always freshly shaved, holding his little head high, with his hair combed over his receding hairline.  He explained to me that Hitler is a good man, perfect, above all humane; that France was stupid for getting upset over such little details as Danzig, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland; that the armistice of 1940 was a masterpiece of generosity, after which the Germans had the right and the duty to shoot French people by the hundreds for being so ungrateful as not to submit.  Oh!  These French!  What horrors they perpetrated while they occupied Germany!  And the good little boche told me of a revolting beastliness:  In Dusseldorf, in 1920, the youth gave a party, during which an actor talked of those awful Poles. “You know what the French did?  They interrupted the play, and put the one who had spoken against the Poles in prison for 2 weeks.  As for the others, they yelled at them!  Yelled at them!”  In the fact of such cruelty, the orator lost his breath, yells in his turn against the resistance, these terrorists, these thugs, these assassins, then, at the end of his eloquence, stretches out on the sofa, near the stove, and goes to sleep.  What an incredible imbecile!

Last night, I dreamt of Jacques.  I saw him, I embraced him, I asked him if it was true.  He said yes, but it was unimportant and a good thing.  I said to him:  Son, come back often and see us ...

We Remember ...

There were more signs that the Germans were disengaging ... the Etobonais were able to ring the church bells on November 11 without permission and without complaint from the occupiers. Convoys continued to bring the dead and wounded from the front by the main road.

Thursday, November 9

The Germans have been waiting impatiently for November 7,  presidential election day in the U.S.  And it’s Roosevelt again.  They are not happy.

Emile Bonhotal, on a work detail to dig trenches at the front, hid the rifle of one of the guards.  (The rifle was found two months later, intact.)

Saturday, November 11

The eleventh of November!  We remember … We had two pastors today, M. Lugbull, who went on to lead worship at Belverne, and M. Nétillard, who led worship at 3:00.  Without asking anyone’s permission, we rang the two church bells.  No reaction at all.

Ernest was the only German in church.

Sunday, November 12

Rain and snow.  I took Jarko a piece of  sheet metal, a leather apron, and a calf skin to cover his hut.  He’s also received a sack of carrots, a sack of apples, an alcohol lamp, a cooking pot.  With that, he can hold on even in a big snow.  He has good sheep’s wool socks and René Bauer’s sabots, which were found in the school after the departure of our 67 men.

In front of the school, in a lake of mud, incessant comings and goings of trucks, cars.  Those that return from the front in the evening are usually loaded with wood.  Behind them, the dead.  On top, the wounded … The boches who’ve been stationed in this village won’t do us any violence when they leave us.  We know them.  We know if they’re Catholics or Protestants.  But those at the front!  We can expect anything.

Monday, November 13

A supposedly new invention is building up the morale of our occupiers.  It’s a winged torpedo, the V2, that goes up to 100 kilometers (they say!)  We’ll see.

Willy Imbey comes back muddy, his feet swimming in his flooded shoes.  We offer to dry them for him.  “Not worth the trouble.  Tomorrow, impossible to put them on.  Always in water.  Soon kaput.  Same to me to end like that.”

"Papa, soon over!"

As the liberators grew closer, even the German troops realized the end was coming. Some bid farewell to the Etobonais, and some just disappeared.

Tuesday, November 14

Surprised by a storm of shells in the village, I went to a shelter, dug out of solid rock that Jules Mignerey had made.  There, we talked about a lot of things, especially the “doctoresse” Deville-Rauch, this Parisian woman, taking refuge in a house where three cousins have been shot.  What shame!  We’ll take care of her, and soon, too.

An order not to leave the village.  The shells are falling one after the other.  We stay warm in our own homes, at the mercy of these infernal things … This evening, a big commotion.  In the dark of night, in the rain and wet snow, trucks going every which way.  Guttural shouts, “Halt!  Stop!” … It’s sinister.  Is it the end?

Wednesday, November 15

Up before dawn, I spot a 2-wheeled caisson for a 52mm mortar in front of my house.  I went up to it and removed a piece, most likely the breech, and hid it under an old sack.  A little later the Germans load the caisson onto a truck along with the mortar, which will never fire again.

In the afternoon, while I was harvesting the last of the cabbage, at the Goutte Evotte, fifty soldiers, in several groups, came down from the front, ragged, haggard, drained, carrying the heaviest objects suspended from poles.  I’ve never seen anything more miserable.  To the last, to try to get them to talk, I offered some apples.  “Krieg nix gut.  Amerika is coming.”  One of them says, in French, “This damned war, the men too.  Ah!  Finished, finished.”

What a mess, everywhere!  Sacks of potatoes are sacks of mud!

Big George is loading his wagon with all his possessions.  The two calves, oats hay, one cow tethered behind, the other having been reclaimed by its owner.  “Goodbye!”  He hands us 400 francs and ships the horse. 

There aren’t many Germans left in the village, ten in all, including Imbey, who asks me to hide him so he can give himself up.  He claims that Montbéliard is in the hands of the Americans.  “Tomorrow, prisoner.  You tell Americans, give myself up volunteer …  If George not had his horse, he be American too.  Good beast, George.  Eat, sleep …”

Thursday, November 16

When he saw me, Jarko threw his arms around my neck.  “Papa, soon over!”

Fritz, the big marshal, asks me for a bill for the oil they’ve burned.  I write him one for 200 francs.  He tears it up.  “Another.  For 400.”  And he pays it.

When Willy Imbey comes to say, “Goodbye,” I’m astonished.  “So, why?”  “Me not leave comrades.  Impossible.  Come back tonight.”