As Belgium struggled to recuperate after the devastation of the First World War, the country reminded all of Europe that Belgium was declared a neutral territory in 1831, and would continue to be a buffer between France and Germany.
I was 18 years old in 1939. My hair was brown. I had read Gone with the Wind in French, and my friend Hava Daniels found an advertisement for the film in an American magazine, and thought Clark Gable, the lead actor, looked like Otto the baker. I spent the autumn going to the opera with Hava.
We were Flemish, but of course everyone in Belgium had to speak both Flemish and French. At one time all the officers in the army spoke French, and all the soldiers spoke Flemish. Poor Belgium: half-Dutch, half-French.
I wasn’t interested in politics. My father was afraid I spent too much time reading novels. He worried that my legs would be weak because I didn’t walk enough. He thought I would go blind because I read so often beside the dim parlour light. He was also disturbed when I said ‘Damn it!’, imitating an American seamstress in a book I was reading.
My mother had died when I was born. I cooked, mended my father’s uniforms, kept the washerwoman busy, and said the rosary three times every night, on my knees before a statue of Mary that I kept illuminated with penny candles.
My father was destined for a military career. He had wanted to be an artist, painting miniature scenes of Belgian farmland onto porcelain plates, but his father had felt that this was nonsense and had sent him to military school where he excelled in mathematics. After his fame in the First World War, he completed a Communication degree at the University of Ghent, was appointed the Military Commissioner of Communications for the entire Belgian army, and was given the rank of major general.
To me, he was just my father.
Our typical days began at the breakfast table where, each morning, he would ask me questions about life. ‘What would you do in a panic?’ he asked once as he buttered his toast. I could hear the scraping of the knife on the hard bread.
‘Run?’ I teased.
He did not laugh. A major general in the Belgian army did not run.
‘Simone,’ he said as he raised the butter knife in the air, ‘you will need to know this someday. Think of life as a sailboat.’ He lowered the knife and looked at me as I sat in my seat with a cup of tea in my hand, anxious to run off to school.
‘Pretend you’re on a small sailboat on a lake. You are guiding the ropes to control the shape and direction of the sails, when suddenly a strong wind blows down from the mountain and begins tipping the boat over sideways and rocking you violently. What do you do?’
I was tempted to say that I would jump in the water and swim away, but that was the same as running in fear. So I said, knowing he expected more of me, ‘Push the sailboat into the wind?’
‘Just let go of the ropes, Simone. Just let go and let the sails flap helplessly. The wind will no longer fill the sails, and the boat will quickly right itself so you can ride out the storm. Remember, in a panic, just let go of the ropes.’
We would spend our evenings together too. One night, after supper, my father sat beside the fireplace with his military documents on his lap. I liked seeing him with a blanket on his knees, writing notes on the pages as I read in my chair beside him. After an hour, he stopped, looked up from his work and asked, ‘What have you discovered in your book tonight?’
If I said something vague like, ‘Something sad,’ he’d ask me to be more specific.
So, I replied, ‘Sister Bernadette has assigned us an English novel – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens’. I’m at the part where Sydney Carton pretends he’s Charles Darnay so that Charles is freed from prison, escapes the guillotine and is united with his love, Lucie.’
My father closed his papers. ‘I remember a line from that book: A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.’
That is how my father and I got along. He asked serious questions, or shared something that he read or remembered.
On another summer evening, while we were sitting before the flames in the fireplace, he handed me the newspaper and said, ‘Simone, you need to know what is happening outside your books. Here, read this.’
My father flattened the newspaper on my lap and pointed to an article about Albert Forster. I stared at him blankly. He sighed.
‘Albert Forster is in charge in Poland. He’s a Nazi and calls Jews dirty and slippery. He’s a monster, Simone. Look here at what he says: Poland will only be a dream.’
I looked up from the newspaper. Being an officer in the army, my father knew much about political and military events.
‘That man wants to invade Poland,’ my father said, as he lifted the paper from my lap and tossed it into the fire. He and I watched the paper smoke, turn black, and then flare up into orange flames.
I did not know then that the first torch of the war was soon to be lit, but my father knew. I did not know then that the monster of war was on its way to get me.
Many years later I would learn that two to three million Polish Jews and two to three million non-Jewish ethnic Poles would be victims of the Nazi genocide.