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Remembering My Mother Patrick d’Albert-Lake My mother never thought of herself as a hero. In wartime, of course, there are many opportunities to become a hero. Almost everyone has a chance. But when you talk to people who have actually done something heroic, they say, ‘‘Well, no, I’m not a hero. I just did what I did because it is normal.’’ As we all know, however, heroism is not normal. My mother never talked about what she did as being heroic. She genuinely thought it was normal. For years my mother rarely talked about what had happened to her during the war. Of course, I knew some things—they came out in bits and pieces—but there was never a discussion about it in my family. We never actually sat down and talked about it. It was taboo, a way for my parents to protect themselves from what had happened. They just put it out of their lives. Besides, the attitude in France after the Second World War was ‘‘Let’s keep all of this sad history out of the way because it’s not going to help.’’ A lot of people just wanted to forget what had happened. Also, we have very high expectations of people we call heroes. We somehow think that they will be different, and indeed their actions make them so, but they don’t think so themselves. Thus, when you approach someone with the attitude that he or she is a ‘‘hero,’’ a wall automatically goes up between you and conversation shuts down. My father had a friend who was taken prisoner by the Japanese. He didn’t want to talk about that experience either. The war’s impact on my mother came out in indirect and subtle ways. We could be gardening and it would be cold outside and maybe it was difficult to dig a hole. My mother would say, ‘‘Oh, that’s nothing, I can handle that,’’ and she’d go ahead and dig a hole in the frozen earth. And, in fact, it was nothing for her. After all, she had built airstrips during one of the coldest winters on record when she was a German prisoner. Even as a child, I knew something had happened to her. I remember that there were airmen who would come through Paris, and my mother and father would go out to dinner with them. I remember going to one or two of these dinners. Although it was years after the war, the airmen wanted to go back and see where they were shot down and who had rescued them. It was a kind of pilgrimage. But I was a small child, so I don’t remember much about the conversations except that these people were very, very nice to me. I suspect they talked about some of the funny things that had happened in Paris when they were hidden by my parents. Of course, when you are in the kind of situation that they were in—the Germans occupied the city and my mother and father were taking great risks—you have to find some humor to survive. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, I read my mother’s memoir. But at that age, it was hard to imagine what she had been through. You don’t understand suffering and courage as well as you do when you’re older. I do remember that she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with a German . She would go crazy. It was physical. She would just shake and start to sweat and we’d have to leave. Because my parents were young, they were not conscious of how dangerous their work with the Resistance truly was. My mother and father and the airmen would go into the Métro and travel all over Paris and there would be Germans everywhere. I think when you are young you are much less conscious of danger and the value of life than later on. You don’t believe in bad luck when you are young; you think you are immortal . It’s only natural. In my mother’s case, however, there was something more. She was also very strong willed. She married my father in 1937 deliberately against the advice of her family. She then left Florida and went to France to live with her husband because, for her, this was an adventure into the unknown...

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