Remembering

To my knowledge, no one in my family died in either of the so-called World Wars, but the impact of both conflicts impacted profoundly on my mother's family in Belgium and France.

She was born in 1917, and often spoke of how few of her schoolmates of the same age had fathers still living. Her  beloved father had undertaken several tours of duty at the front, and survived.

In the second war, too old for active service, he stubbornly refused to rush down into the cellar when there was a bombing raid; he would prefer to stand outside and watch the dog fights in the sky above, willing the Allied planes to victory. She remembers him shaking his fist at the German planes, the rest of the family frantic with worry in case he was hurt.

She herself was caught in an air raid, and was pulled alive from the rubble of a house where she and another woman with a small child had sought shelter. They died; she was saved because her hand protruded from the ruins and the watch she wore reflected the light and caught the attention of rescuers.

The scar on the back of her thigh, just visible if she wore shorts, would enthral us as children; that was from "Mummy being bombed in the war".

After the war, she met my father when both were stationed in Berlin, she with the French Army, he with the British; she would talk of the pathways bulldozed through the mountains of rubble that the city had become. In her papers we found the official permit that had allowed her to cross the Russian Zone to return to Ghent to visit her parents.

So on this day, the 11th of November, I think about not only those who died, but my family who - like so many other families -  lived, suffered, endured, and survived to remember. And to pass on small fragments of those memories to us, the privileged, who grew up in freedom.