A Family Story About Resilience

While being over for more than a month, 2020 has already gone down in history as the toughest year in the 21st century for virtually everybody on planet Earth. Finding a person who has not been impacted by the Covid-19 epidemic is a challenge: hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19 or as collateral damage; free-falling economies following a willing or imposed lockdown; sky-rocketing unemployment rates leading to more people going into poverty. One has to look at last century’s two World Wars, the Great depression of the 1930s or the oil crisis and economic recession of the 1970s to find events similar in scale and consequences. And while 2021 was expected to be the year when we would return back to a normal life (or as close as possible), it turns out the pandemic is not over, in spite of vaccinations having started, and the coming year will test – again – our resilience.

I am no exception to this, as 2020 proved to be one of the most difficult year in my entire life. What helped me in finding the strength to overcome challenges and setbacks was the story of one of my grandfathers, Robert. This is this that I’d like to share with you.

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My grandfather was born in France in 1920 – a part of the generation that unfortunately turned 20 right on time for World War II. The war was short-lived as France was defeated by the Nazis within two months (May and June 1940), so my grandfather escaped the fate and life of a soldier. Little did he know that he would have to endure something worse…

During the next two years, France moved towards closer cooperation with Nazi Germany, led by an illegally established government that had negotiated France’s capitulation in 1940, and this culminated in Autumn of 1942 with a law about the Mandatory Work Service (called “STO” in French). The law aimed at sending 250,000 French men and women to so-called “work camps” in Germany where they would replace the young German workers who were serving in the Wehrmacht and could not support the German economy. The law focused on the generations of 1920, 1921 and 1922 by “commuting” their army service into a work tenure. And as the next months showed, the French government implemented this law with unexpected severity – often going as far as kidnapping young men on the street and letting their family know only a few hours before their departure.

By 1942, my grandfather had somehow survived two difficult years and already met my grandmother, Marie; and as far as I heard, they were engaged and planning to marry.  The war was going on, life was not easy as the basics items (food for example) were difficult to find, but my grandfather was still living, more or less, the life of a 20-year old, studying, working on the side to make ends meet, and looking for love. The STO law put an abrupt end to this, and within a few weeks, my grandfather’s life turned upside down: he was arrested, sent to a military caser with other young men, then put onto the next train to Germany. Within a few days, he arrived to a work camp in East Germany, where he would spend the next two years.

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I tried figuring out how my grandfather must have felt then, but it is near to impossible. First, my grandfather never talked about those years, at least not with his grandchildren; then, he died when I was still young and well below the age where I could have listened to and understood his story, so I never had a chance to ask him directly. The twenties are an age when one thinks that nothing is impossible and when life seems to have the most to offer, both professionally and socially. Yet, at that age, my grandfather found itself many thousand kilometers away from his family, friends and fiancée, in a country he did not know and whose language he barely spoke, in a harsh environment. While officially “employed”, workers did actually receive very little for their work, and their living conditions were sometimes close to those of prisoners of war, with not enough food, no medicine and poor if no utilities (water, heating systems…) in the barracks where they lived. One of the few stories I heard about his life there is about a birthday my grandfather and his mates wanted to celebrate; as main dish, they hunted, killed and cooked the cat of the camp’s commander… it says a lot about the conditions they were facing there. 

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At what should have been the brightest time of his life, my grandfather found himself in an environment aiming at his exploitation – and with death being an “accident”. How he did not become mad, I will never know. How he managed to survive those days, weeks and months there, I will also not know. I just know that somehow, he found hope in himself that one day he would escape all of this; and this guiding light gave him enough strength and resilience to keep him alive for more than two years, in spite of the hunger, the extreme cold and heat, and the harsh work conditions that were imposed onto him and other workers, until the camp was freed by the Soviets at the end of 1944 or beginning of 1945. My grandfather was actually lucky that the Nazi soldiers did not kill them while the Soviets were approaching, and he was (again) lucky that the Soviet soldiers let him and some other young French men go back to France. He was lucky to make it back to France through a country, Germany, that was still raging with war (besides the Soviet army, the Americans and Britons were now invading it in order to end the Nazi regime) and to be eventually reunited with my grandmother who had had to move to the South of France. They finally married in August 1945 and settled down in what would become my home town.

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So, when things get rough, I think of my grandfather and everything he had to go through. He did not have the choice, but I still have it. He managed to survive life-threatening events in spite of death being close to him every day, and so must I. If it was not for him, his courage and resilience, I would not be here. So I must live up to his example, and memory.