Poisoned lines in the sand.
When you go down to the beach today, take a sharp stick with you. Draw a line in the sand, from surf to tree line. I doesn’t matter where, or in which direction, what matters is that it is there. It doesn’t matter whether you have any relationship with the people one side or other of the line, nor whether you even like them or not.
You are now fully equipped to have a War. That line was all you needed.
You can now call the people the other side of the line ‘your enemy’; no manner of death is too extreme for them, no torture too horrific.
A mere 70 years ago such a war was fought over a line that had been drawn between France and Germany. Marshall Pétain invented the word ‘collaborator’ to describe his desire to work peacefully with Germany rather than fighting to the death over that line. It came to be one of vilest insults you could hurl at anybody.
70 years ago young Mademoiselle Lea Rouxel took a job in the Dinard canteen of the airbase built and inhabited by men from the other side of that line. She met Lieutenant Ammon. The result was young Daniel.
The Americans came along and killed Lieutentant Ammon. There was much cheering and rejoicing in the land, for he was from the ‘other’ side of the line. There wasn’t any cheering or rejoicing in the Rouxel household. Mademoiselle had no means of support for young Daniel, Daniel had no father any longer.
If I close my eyes and try really, really, hard, I can just about understand the justification for Madame Rouxel’s crime of being a ‘collaborator’ – I can’t begin to agree with it, but I can follow the logic.
I cannot in my wildest imagination understand the logic behind young Daniel being a ‘criminal collaborator’ too.
His birth certificate said he was of ‘father unknown’, although this was patently untrue. Not only was his father known, but by all accounts he was a supportive and responsible father for the few years before he was killed. It was not his Mother’s wish that his birth certificate said that – it was by order of the French Government who refused to acknowledge that any Frenchwoman could possibly have fathered a child by a German officer.
At the age of just six he recalls bearing the brunt of a cruel public joke by the village mayor.
“Which one of you knows the difference between a swallow and a Boche?” Mr Rouxel remembers the mayor asking.
“I’ll tell you. When the swallow makes its babies here in France, it takes them with it when it leaves. But the Boche – he leaves his behind.”
Mr Rouxel – the “baby left behind” – was devastated.
His grandmother forced him to sleep in an outhouse ‘with the other animals’. She was so ashamed of him that she would lock him out of sight, in the cold and the filth, whenever guests were visiting.
As an adult, his marriage broke up when his wife, of some 15 years, belatedly discovered that his father was a ‘boche’.
As it happens, his German family have been very supportive and he has excellent relations with them. Last week, more than six decades after his birth, the son of a French mother and a German Wehrmacht officer, the now retired Daniel Rouxel was at last granted duel citizenship and acknowledgement of his German father – along with a measure of dignity and sanity that has taken him 60 years of fighting bureaucracy to achieve.
Spurred by a 2004 investigative book, Enfants Maudits (Accursed Children), and a television documentary that came out at the same time, hundreds of men and women in their 60s have contacted the army archives department in Berlin to find out more about their lost parents.
In all, it is estimated that as many as 200,000 French children were born to illicit liaisons during the German occupation between May 1940 and December 1944, though the figure is impossible to verify.
Germany finally agreed on February 19 to grant joint citizenship to those war children who want it, and Rouxel was the first to sign up.
It wasn’t just a French problem you see, the German’s were no more keen to acknowledge that any fine German officer could, would, possibly have bedded a young French woman.
For the past six decades, French and German society has been incapable of even considering the existence of so many people like M. Rouxel. In common with other nations, they had built themselves on a scaffold of national mythology that concealed huge fissures in their collective soul. Into those fissures, unseen by anyone, fell an entire community of people whose existence could not be admitted.
This is how nations construct themselves: by turning the embarrassing ambiguities of the past into official narratives, and exorcising inconsistencies like M. Rouxel.
Have a look at the people the other side of your line in the sand – can you work up the energy to hate them that much? To kill them for crossing your line? To persecute and ostracise their children for their mixed parentage?
So what makes the difference for you when someone else drew the line on a map a couple of hundred years ago?
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1
August 16, 2009 at 2:01 pm -
A fine and excellent piece I read about this yesterday.
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2
August 16, 2009 at 3:16 pm -
Very thought provoking, Anna – thank you.
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3
August 16, 2009 at 5:57 pm -
I found that very upsetting. Human beings. Kids, for crying out loud. As a species, we have a long way to go, developmentally, before we can deserve the description ‘Civilised.’
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4
August 16, 2009 at 7:15 pm -
Fine sentiments, well written. Thank you.
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5
August 16, 2009 at 9:19 pm -
Excellent, it the end the love of two people eventually won out against two States and ‘patriotism’ truly the last refuge of fools
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6
August 17, 2009 at 12:13 am -
Yes, because lines on a map were all that separate the Germanic and Franco peoples. Particularly then.
Ostracising their kids, no. Killing those that cross the line? I don’t need to build up hatred for that. I am obligated to kill them. It is duty.
What makes the difference for me? Nazism would be more than enough.
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7
August 17, 2009 at 3:25 am -
Roger has it right I am afraid – it’s all fine and dandy when both sides of the line respect it, but when one side wants to occupy the otherside and dominate and eliminate them by a collection of rather nasty and objectional means – should we then say “Oh let’s not find it in our hearts to hate them – it’s probably all our fault anyway”
How do you know how the French people were treated? How many of their relatives were forcibly transported to concentration camps or work camps – are you familiar with the methods by which an occupied country is kept in subjection? It doesn’t appear so.
Policies created by national governments are carried out by people. I can hate the policy of the government but I can’t do anything about it – but I can also hate the people who carry out the policy and I can do something about them.
Unfortunately the child you sympathise with, is seen as a product of an unnatural relationship – unnatural that is to those who object to the occupation of their country and the oppressive measures undertaken by the occupying force, one of whom fathered this child.
It may offend you – and I can feel sympathy for the child – but I also understand the visceral hatred occupied people have their oppressors.
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8
August 17, 2009 at 8:43 am -
Speaking from a culture that had to endure German and Russian occupation with the deaths of many of my relatives, I have no sympathy for Fritz or his offspring. Should have stayed at home and kept his trousers buttoned.
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9
August 17, 2009 at 9:12 am -
During the war German POWs worked in the woodyard at the back of my grandparent’s house. My grandfather used to pop lunch packages through the fence to help the emaciated men working there. It couldn’t have been much what with rationing and all but must surely have helped. My mother befriended one of the lucky recipients, a chap by the name of Paul Zurn who had been captured during the battle of Falaise gap. Paul’s family and mine are still friends 65 years on.
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10
August 17, 2009 at 9:43 am -
“Lines in the sand” are not merely drawn between ‘nations’ or ‘cultures’ all of which are social constructs that try to enable us to understand the world. No, lines of sand are drawn within nations, within cultures, within areas, within families, within relationships. Ans, me thinks, it’s all about power and authority, ownership and control. Until we sort these things out as human beings we will always have lines in the sand.
By the way, the beach here at Musings Hall, 700 miles inland, is looking real good this morning, the sun is shining….
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11
August 18, 2009 at 8:19 pm -
An excellent post as always. I reckon the Froggies’ beastliness to the Germans and collaborators, especially female ,(known as Jerrybags in the Channel Islands) was due in large part to national shame at losing so quickly and easily to an opponent inferior in all respects except strategy and tactics. The Vichy forces fought hard in Syria and Madagascar against British forces and Morocco against the Americans of Operation Torch. I recommend this excellent book on the topic:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Englands-Last-War-Against-France/dp/0297852183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250618557&sr=1-1
Compare Vichy France’s capitulation to the Japanese in Indo-China.
To the best of my recollection, it was John Keegan who stated that before D-Day 1% of French men and women (mainly communists) were active resisters in Metropolitan France yet 99% claimed membership of the Maquis afterwards. However,I’m not criticising anyone in France or the rest of Europe who endured occupation by the Germans who would arrest and execute anyone off the streets in reprisal for resistance attacks.
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