Paris was occupied for 4 years, starting 1940. German soldiers entered France and cut-off Paris from the rest of the country. They moved the governmenParis was occupied for 4 years, starting 1940. German soldiers entered France and cut-off Paris from the rest of the country. They moved the government to Vichy and turned Paris into a ghost town which was not the symbolic capital of the divided country anymore. The German soldiers in Paris roamed about and were polite in all their interactions with Parisians. Whatever ill-will was felt for the Germans, it was hard to project that onto these quite soldiers walking around a city that was ostensibly under siege. As time went on, people can get used to nearly anything; so did Parisians: they got _used_ to the occupation, even as they silently wondered what would become of them. They had been reduced to symbols: A city, stripped of it's place in the world; The occupation did not serve any purpose for the Germans; it was a _symbol_ of German dominance in Europe. Parisians were stuck between a rock and a hard place: They had lost a war, but they had lost it so quickly that there was nothing to learn from the loss; They couldn't _say_ the occupation was undeserved; They couldn't claim that their actions during the occupation redeemed them of the loss either. When a _lost German soldier_ would ask them for directions, they remembered being told as children to help a man in need. Even as they helped the soldier, they felt tainted and as a traitor with a conscience does. Irrespective of what they did, they would end up unhappy. As the occupation went on, they accepted this unhappiness and simplified their life and conversations.
I already encountered this trouble once before. I had come back from captivity and people questioned me about the life of the prisoners of war. How could I make those who had not lived in them experience the atmosphere of the camps?
First we must get rid of certain naive misconceptions: no, the Germans didn't march through the streets, weapons in hand; no, they didn't force civilians to step aside and get off the sidewalks; in the subway, they offered their seats to old ladies, they gushed eagerly over babies and stroked their cheeks; they had been told to behave and they did so timidly and diligently out of discipline.
What rendered them [the German soldiers occupying Paris] inoffensive was their ignorance of our language. Many a time I heard Parisians in cafes express themselves freely about politics a few steps away from a solitary German who was sitting down and staring vaguely at a glass of lemonade.
The notion of an enemy is altogether firm and clear only if the enemy is separated from us by a line of fire.
A symbol: this hardworking and irascible city was no more a symbol. We looked in each others' eyes and wondered if we too hadn't become symbols. It is because they stole our future for four years. We had to count on others. And for the others we were only an object. ... Before the war, if we happened to look sympathetically at a child, a young man or woman, it was because we sensed their future and foresaw it vaguely in the gestures and in the creases of their faces because a living person is first of all a project, an enterprise. But the occupation had stripped people of their future.
Those who congratulate us ironically because we escaped the war can't imagine with what eagerness the French would have liked to have taken up arms again. Day after day, we saw our cities destroyed, our riches obliterated; our youth waste away. 3 million men were rotting away in Germany and France's birthrate dropped. What battle could have been more destructive? But these sacrifices, which we could have made gladly if they had hastened our victory, were meaningless and served no purpose or served the Germans. And that is perhaps something that everyone will understand: what is terrible is not to suffer nor to die, but to suffer and die in vain.
It is not true that tragedy brings people closer.
Our requirements diminished with our memories and since one gets used to everything we were ashamed that we were getting used to our misery, the rutabagas that were served as meals, the minuscule freedoms that we still enjoyed, our psychological emptiness. We steadily simplified our lives and we ended up talking only of food.
But we are asking you [the readers of this essay] first of all to understand that often the occupation was more terrible than the war. Because in war everybody performs his allotted task while in our ambiguous situation we were unable to really act or even to think.
A good concise recap of world war 2. The author drops a lot of the details from the narrative to make it easier to understand the outline. This is notA good concise recap of world war 2. The author drops a lot of the details from the narrative to make it easier to understand the outline. This is not a book for anyone who wants to find out about something particular in WW2; But for getting an idea of what was going on in each year and how each leader was reacting to those events, this is a great book!
(After reading a bunch of WW2 books, this book was the first time I understood why some of the iconic moments of the war are iconic: Churchill's involvement, the connection between Stalin and Hitler, Hitler's stale-mate situation on being unable to take England despite being wildly successful in Europe)...more
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