What D-Day Meant for a Little Girl in France
Special edition for the 80th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy
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For a little girl in France, namely my mother-in-law Natalie, D-Day meant that soon she would not have to hide under a barn anymore, as she had been for two years.
D-Day meant that my summer’s end, she would not have to peer through the crack in the root cellar’s wall to check if was safe for her to venture out.
As Allied troops landed on June 6, 1944, however, she had no idea that that was happening. It was just another summer day in the tiny village of Briosne-Lès-Sables.
D-Day was another day of life on the farm, minding the animals.
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Briosne-lès-Sables lies just south of Normandy, close to Le Mans, and it took the Allied forces until the end of August 1944 to break out of Normandy. So, Natalie’s summer that year was spent like the previous two summers: Constantly watching out for Nazi soldiers, of whom there were plenty in the area, as you can see from their sizable nearby positions (in red) in the map above.
Nevertheless D-Day meant, that, at some point later that summer, American soldiers did show up in Briosne-lès-Sables, offering glorious packets of chocolate to the children.
My mother-in-law loved to recall how utterly heavenly that chocolate tasted, and what a miracle it had been for those beneficent Americans to show up. She and her siblings had not tasted chocolate since they had hastily left Paris in the summer of 1942 after their mother had been arrested by French police during one of the round-ups of Jews in the nation’s capital. After their mother’s arrest, the children themselves had been packed off to a Jewish orphanage, which was basically a holding pen for being shipped off to the killing camps in Poland.
As the story goes, a nurse at the orphanage held them back from transports because she could not believe that those blue-eyed, and, in Natalie’s sister’s case, blonde children were Jewish. Those few days left enough time for Natalie’s dad, who was already underground, to locate his children, bribe them free, and get them off into hiding in the countryside, aided by their mother’s friend Hermine.
D-Day did not mean, however, an immediate return to Natalie’s previous life in Paris.
That life was gone. Her mother had been murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942. While her father had survived, mainly by hiding in the vicinity of his children, he had nothing to go back to in a Paris destroyed by war.
Thus the family continued to live in Briosne-lès-Sables until 1946, when they were finally able to return to Paris and rebuild their lives there.
In the above picture from 1946, Natalie is helping out on one of the farms in Briosne-lès-Sables.
We do not know who the other people in the photo are, except that they are not family. This is the only picture we have of her from that time as, of course, one does not take photos while in hiding.
In this image Natalie has put on some weight since liberation. One of her main memories of life in hiding was the hunger they all suffered. She would chuckle when recalling how many times her older brothers, who were hidden on another farm in the area, got terrible diarrhea from eating unripe fruits. The kids learned to stuff themselves whenever food was available as they didn’t know when they’d get their next meal, a habit that created a struggle with weight for the rest of Natalie’s life.
Another legacy of Natalie’s childhood years spent living under a barn was her hatred of being in the dark. At night, she always had a light on, preferably the TV flickering as well.
Natalie was six years old when she went into hiding, and ten when the family was able to move back to Paris.
The teacher in the small village school was one of only three people in the village (the others being the mayor and the priest), who knew that these “refugee” children were Jewish. She did her best to instruct them when they could come to school, but she would also keep them out of school when it wasn’t safe for them to attend.
To a large extent, Natalie missed out on the formative elementary school years. That lack of schooling probably exacerbated her latent dyslexia, and while she grew up to become an avid reader and lifelong learner, she was never on solid footing education-wise.
For Natalie, D-Day meant that about three months later she could move about freely. Mainly, though, it meant her survival and that of her father and her siblings wasn’t in constant deadly danger anymore.
It meant that eventually, they would rebuild their lives in the post-Holocaust, post-WWII world, without her mother, but thankfully with Hermine, who ended up becoming a wonderful stepmother to Natalie and her siblings.
A stark reminder of how fragile our world is.
You first brought Natalie’s story to my attention in your book “Jumping Over Shadows”. As I recall, you, Harry, and children returned with Natalie in her later years to that place. One can’t imagine what she felt at that time. It should only have been triumph. Still catches my breath thinking about it.
Good stuff as always, Annette.