I used to start my day with a few hours of translating, but my clients have all temporarily stopped their activity, so I found a new project in order to keep my ritual going (the hardest thing about rituals is starting them…) My grandparents both wrote journals of their experience in WWII, and I started translating them for my English cousins who are interested in reading them. I have to say, I rolled my eyes at my president’s “We are at war” speech, yet I am struck by the many similarities I am finding with the current situation:
the “eeriness of empty city streets”, the curfews, the panic buying, the movie theatres closing, the inability to travel to be with family, or even to walk in the street without a written attestation (Ausweis)
French people from the cities being asked by the government to go help farmers with harvest due to a shortage of seasonal labour, just like we are seeing now
(Of course the situation was incomparably worse—I’m not equating the two, I just didn’t expect to find all these parallels)
The most striking similarity is in the way they feel about the events: they both write about how the uncertainty of these times produces a strange mixture of stress and morbid fascination. My grandmother describes the first time she saw the Nazi flag flying above the City Hall, saying she felt “distress, and an incongruous curiosity—how will all of this end?” My grandfather, writing about the dangerous process of changing his identity and obtaining fake documentation to avoid being deported to Germany, says “Tout cela est très éprouvant pour les nerfs. Malgré tout… quelle année intéressante nous traversons.” (“This is all very nerve-wracking. Nevertheless, what an interesting year we are living through.”)
My grandmother writes about how stunned she would feel if “myself from not so very long ago” could get a glimpse of her current life: all of her projects frozen in time, her studies interrupted (“I wish I had been able to finish the year—they’ve had such trouble organising the classes and exams, they gave the Baccalauréat almost to everybody!”), her wedding cancelled, “I am now hiding people in my basement”, and her fiancé, “formerly fond of insect collecting”, now “keeps himself busy planting bombs on railway tracks” to stop freight trains going to Germany.
(She uses a lot of breezy euphemisms; at one point she briefly mentions being interrogated by Nazis re: her fiancé travelling to the ‘forbidden zone’ then starts the next paragraph with “Despite this contretemps—” and moves on to how she still had time to fill her purse with dead leaves on the Champs Elysées so she could light the stove.)
She writes about the difficulty of getting accurate information amidst all the contradictory news sources (Resistance radio broadcasts, rumours around her, German propaganda, lies from her own government), and about how unsettling it feels “quand la vie ne va plus de soi” (“when life no longer goes without saying”)
I saw French people on twitter joking about how “after coronavirus, we won’t bring back cheek-kissing, okay?” and was amused to find an entry in my grandmother’s journal saying in the middle of all this turmoil, she & her fiancé have started using the informal “you” with each other, and she hopes that when the war is over, French society won’t go back to expecting people to use “vous” until marriage.
The very beginning of the war, around her 19th birthday, also presents interesting parallels: she is frustrated with her mother who is planning a holiday trip and acting like nothing serious is going on, and is simultaneously still confused about “the events” and wondering if she is misjudging their severity
In April 1944, as she finally hopes to see “this nightmare end soon”, she speculates on what aspect the future post-crisis society will take, when will normal life resume and what will ‘normal’ be? Then she says making conjectures is futile for the time being because “we cannot measure the depth of a derangement that is still under way.”
One last arresting part, in 1942: “Ce que j’ignorais quant aux calamités et bouleversements est que, lorsqu’on les vit soi-même, le temps passe très lentement.” (“What I didn’t know about life-altering disasters is that, when you are living them, time goes by very slowly.”)
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