EARLY DECEMBER, 1944, NORMANDY, FRANCE,
First, it was the German occupation, trucks and automobiles rumbling on the roadway, a juggernaut of metal and iron that followed weeks of persistent rumors, and then finally the news over the scratchy broadcast from the radio that Paris had fallen almost without a single shot fired. At least none that anyone would talk about.
Afterward, there were pictures in the newspaper of centuries-old monuments in the city, draped with the German flag, the swastika like a black skeleton against blood-red and white, street signs replaced with signs printed in German, the city and a thousand years of history disappearing beneath the black boots of Adolph Hitler's army.
Then word that came down that the French people were now required to cover the expenses of the occupying army with the franc reduced to one-fifth the value against the German mark. When they could not pay, food, animals, anything of value was confiscated, “to pay your share,” they were told. Until people were reduced to starving.
Next there were rumors of people who disappeared from towns and villages around the countryside, loaded onto rail cars, requisitioned, and transported to Germany under the Servicedu Travail Obligatoire, forced labor in German factories to feed the war machine. Others were taken, leaflets distributed in town centers and villages, declaring that, “After each incident of resistance, a number, reflecting the seriousness of the crime, shall be shot”.
It was then her father and brothers left their farm, to join the Resistance, with the Vichy government powerless to stop the atrocities, complicit, some said, in the brutality against the French people, lining their own pockets, playing the game against the time when the war would be over.
Micheleine Robillard stood in the doorway of the kitchen in that small house on their farm, her sister Angeline leaning in and staring up at her with the innocence of seven years of age, unable to understand their mother's weeping, the words whispered across the wood kitchen table.
“There is enough food in the cellar to keep you and the girls,” she caught the conversation, glancing back and forth between her mother and father with far greater understanding.
“But do not squander what you have.”
“When will you return?” her mother had asked. A question that had no answer.
Her father had covered her mother's hand then, in that way she had seen hundreds of times, a gesture meant to comfort, now with far more meaning.
Her brothers stood behind him, dressed in their woolen field coats and hats, hunting rifles hung over their shoulders—Stephen and Robert, seventeen and twenty years of age. Earlier, Robert had crossed the orchard separating their farm from their neighbors under cover of darkness—the fox, their father called him—and said good-bye to Anne Marie Lechance. They had grown up together and planned to wed. But all of that had changed. Now there would be no wedding, even though Anne Marie carried his child.
Micheleine's father turned then and motioned her to the table.
“You must help your mother,” he told her. “Gather as much of the crop as you can. Think of our friends and neighbors, save the rest of the crop for yourselves. Dried apples will stay a long while in the cellar. When there is no more money, you will need food for barter.”
“Yes, Papa,” she had replied, with the maturity of someone far older.
“I am counting on you to take care of things. If you need help, go to Lechance. He is old, but he is strong as a bull and will help you and your mother.”
Then the three of them were slipping out the back door of the farmhouse under cover of darkness, food sacks over their shoulders, hasty kisses for her mother, her father's callused hand gentle against her cheek.
“If you need to leave, you know the safe place.”
Micheleine nodded, blinking back tears in spite of her determination not to cry. He had showed it to her brother’s years before. She had followed in spite of his instructions to stay home, only discovering that the shadow that had followed them through the forest was no fox or deer, but his wayward daughter.
“What am I to do with you, Micheleine?” he had said that day, fighting his way between anger that she had tracked them, and the same pride as when he taught his sons to track and hunt in the forest.
“I want to go with you,” she replied, what seemed perfectly logical at the time.
In the days and weeks after her father and brothers left to join the Resistance, those tracking and hunting skills had proven invaluable after their chickens and pigs were seized under the new confiscation ordinance. From her hunting in the forest after the apple crop was in, she often brought back rabbit or grousethat her mother prepared for their meal, until it became too dangerous to wander into the forest with Germans constantly moving along the roadway, encamped in the forest, or occupying the village.
It was her mother who decided that she must leave.
“It is not safe for you to stay,” her mother said, returning from the village where she went weekly to take mended clothing to friends, messages hidden in her sewing basket.
“A young girl was found.” The rest of the story had become a familiar one.
“She was raped and beaten. Monsieur Cousteau does not think she will live.”
The doctor had passed messages to the outlying farms. They were all aware of the danger, and for that reason she had curtailed her trips into the forest, never taking the same trail twice, often taking no trail at all. She wore her hair tucked into her camp and dressed in some of her brothers' clothes. She was an excellent shot, and she'd also learned to use the knife.
“You must go,” her mother announced. Cousteau's son, it seemed, was leaving to join the Resistance.
“What about you and Angeline?”
“We will stay as long as we can. If we must leave, so be it.”
