大象传媒

A MEMOIR OF THE WAR, or Why I am Afraid of Mice.

Ginette Expert

[I am adding this story on behalf of my mother, who is a French woman, born in 1932, who has lived in England since the mid 1950s.]

In 1944, Toulouse, previously a free zone, was occupied by the German army and as we lived in the proximity of a gunpowder factory that could be blown up by either force, our father, just released from prison-camp and very ill, decided that my brother and I (aged 5 and 11) should be sent to the country when school broke up.

We were billeted close to each other in farms located in an isolated area, near a large wood. Every afternoon, I used to go and play at the other farm.

One day, after a disagreement, I returned early to 鈥渕y鈥� farm, where I found to my dismay and terror, several unknown men gathered around a radio. They looked startled and alarmed and I was roundly told off for my early return.

I quickly realised that the men were resistance fighters and was terrified of the eventual reprisals, so, when some time later on my journey home I heard and saw a lorry full of armed German troops, I dived into a stack of wheat sheaves and stayed there, petrified, until nightfall.

I learned many years later that there was an active reseau of the Resistance in the area and that, that day, the Germans had made for the local manor, which was a command-post for a battalion of the FFI, commanded by Lieutenant Maulik. There they shot the owner, the Comte d鈥橭rgeix. His son hid and so escaped execution.

Since then, the terror of that day has been transposed to the rodents that make their home in those stacks of wheat sheaves.

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