 asanova Restaurant Book: Denise's Story
Chapter 2
After Rita and Gilbert returned home, our life during the early years of the war was calm. Our father's work as the village blacksmith continued, and customers came to our door each day to buy groceries from my mother. My father also did plumbing, so he was often called to surrounding villages to repair water pipes.
In the summer of 1941, my grandfather, Nicolas Georis, died. I remember everyone was so sad, but I overheard my aunts say that it was good that a new baby was coming while the Grandpa was leaving. A couple of weeks later, I had a new baby brother, Gaston. It was a time of mixed emotion - joy and sadness. Gaston was the easiest baby, so quiet and good. My mother called him "shepelline," little lamb.
Rita and I would baby-sit for Gaston while my mother worked in the store, which was located in the front room of our house. There was no sign outside advertising the store; everyone in the village just knew they could come to our house for groceries. Customers would knock on our massive front door, hand-forged by our father from heavy iron and decorated with a pale green stained-glass window. My mother would emerge from the kitchen, the inviting aroma of her bean soup drifting out into the hall. She would lead her customer into our front room where she offered a wide variety of items for sale: basic goods and candies, and even cloth, woodstoves and greeting cards. During those war years, jams and syrups came in large metal buckets. Customers would bring their own glass jars to be filled with strawberry jam or pear syrup, a Belgian specialty. My mother would reseal the buckets with a tight-fitting lid.
Everything was rationed during the war years. Each family received coupons based on the number of people in the family and their ages. For example, an adult may be allowed an egg every two weeks and three ounces of sweets -- jelly, candy or granulated sugar - and a little meat, but a larger amount of pasta and bread. As for cigarettes, a man could have two per day, and women only one, but men in the German army could have ten cigarettes a day. Even though it was illegal, people would sometimes trade stamps. I remember an old woman asked a young man in our store if he would trade two tobacco stamps for a sugar stamp. She didn't smoke and he did, it was a good trade for both of them.
Vegetables were not rationed because everyone had their own garden. In the spring, my mother grew crisp butter lettuce, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower and tender peas in our garden. Summer brought celery, herbs, potatoes, and green beans that grew on vines twisting up the trellis strings. The garden was edged with gooseberries, currants and strawberries, and we had plum, pear and apple trees.
Summer was also the time for harvesting the wild blueberries that grew in the woods surrounding our village. Our mother packed sandwiches and a thermos of coffee early in the morning, and Rita and I walked behind her through the woods with our buckets. In the afternoon, we returned, our buckets full of berries and our hands and mouths stained blue. It was like a treasure hunt to find this free food!
Sometimes, we would sell the berries to the hotel, but often my mother made them into pies, jam or jelly. Nothing was wasted in our house. Whatever we didn't eat, my mother would preserve in glass jars, sealed with a red rubber ring and clamped tight with a glass lid. Rows and rows of jars filled with jams, vegetables and fruits filled the shelves in our cellar, closets, and attic. A large wooden bin filled with hundreds of pounds of potatoes was in our cellar. Even when there was a thick blanket of snow on the ground, we could enjoy bowls of summer fruit and steaming plates of sauerkraut and sausages that she had preserved. So rationing did not affect us much. We had plenty of good food to eat.
Even though vegetables were not rationed, all dairy products were. The German government was so organized; they knew exactly how many chickens or cows a farmer had. Each farmer had a quota for delivering a certain number of eggs or gallons of milk to the government each week. Just because a farmer had a full hen house, didn't mean that his family could have more than its rationed share of eggs!
We collected the ration stamps at our store when the customers purchased their groceries. There were about ten different types of stamps, each a different color: sugar was blue; flour was orange; dairy was yellow, and so on. The stamps were not perforated like they are today, so they had to be separated with scissors. My mother sorted each stamp into boxes according to its color.
On Sunday afternoon or in the evenings when we had finished our homework, Mama would say, "Come sit around the kitchen table. We have stamps to glue." She would place the boxes of stamps on the table and give us empty stamp books to fill. First we made paste from flour and water - there was no commercial glue then -- and we used a wallpaper brush to glue the ration stamps into the books. By the time the flour and water glue dried, the books had swollen until they were four inches thick! Every week my mother delivered her ration books to the City Hall. She received her allotment of wholesale goods for the store based on the number of books she turned in.
Most of my mother's customers were farmers. They would select goods from her shelves, and she would record their purchases in her ledger. When the farmer sold a cow, he would come to the store and pay off his bill. Everyone could be trusted in our village.
Well, almost everyone! Sometimes when my mother was busy in the other part of the house, I would slip into the store and help myself to some candy or treat. It didn't take her long to figure out what I was doing. She knew that I especially liked the little treats we called "atrappe," or "surprise." These little white bags held a prize - maybe a plastic ring, lapel pin, or a little game, similar to the prizes children find in a Cracker Jack box today. Once an "atrappe" was opened, it couldn't be sold, which is why my mother kept them in a box on the highest shelf where I couldn't reach them.
But I knew where she hid the box. I was always a bit of a tomboy, so I figured out how to climb the shelves to reach the prizes. But on my way down, I stepped onto the top of the strawberry jam bucket. The loose lid flipped up, and I found myself knee-deep in red jam. I ran out of the store and hid my sticky shoes under the piano in our living room, thinking my mother would never find out. Of course, all she had to do was follow my footprints.
But I wasn't the only one who got into trouble. Years earlier, when I was only three years old, and Rita was about eight, she wrote "From the Georis Family" in her very best handwriting on all the Christmas cards that were for sale in my mother's store. I'm sure that Rita thought she was being helpful because she always tried to be well-behaved, but my father was furious that my mother had no holiday cards that she could sell!
When Gilbert learned that my father was going to spank Rita for writing on the cards, our brother said, "We are moving out tonight." The three of us always stuck together. Rita dressed me in my warmest clothes, and we left after dark, determined that we would never come home again. Gilbert pulled me on the sled, and we headed across the village to our grandmother's house. It was very cold and the snow was glistening in the moonlight. We were shivering by the time we arrived in front of her house, but we didn't have the courage to knock on her door and tell our Grandmother that we had run away from home. Finally, we decided to return home. Our father opened the door as soon as we walked up our front porch steps, "Oh, so you are already home? You did not stay very long." Rita said, "We had to come home because Denise was cold." We went upstairs to our rooms, and Rita never did get her spanking.
Gilbert had a room of his own, and Rita and I shared a room. Gilbert didn't like being left alone, so many nights he would sneak into our room after our parents went to bed. We'd tell funny stories or gossip, talking about the funny hat that so-and-so wore to church. Or we'd talk about Anna, who would play with us as if she was a child too, even though she was as old as our mother. She worked as a maid at the church and sometimes, when the priest wasn't around, she would put on his robes and go into the confessional booth. We would take turns confessing to some minor sin - like eating the liquor-filled candies from our mother's store. Anna would tell us to repent and walk around the block three times. Now I realize that Anna was mentally retarded, but to us she was just another funny member of our community. Rita, Gilbert and I would giggle and whisper in the dark until we fell asleep.
* * *
During these early years of the war, all of our classes were taught in German. This wasn't a problem for us since we always spoke German with our mother, but some of the other children had trouble learning the new language.
The Germans sent teachers who supported the Nazi regime to our school. I began the first grade while our village was under German occupation. Rita and I went to school in Ligneuville, and Gilbert's school was in a nearby village.
My first grade teacher lived on the street behind our house. She was unmarried, and wore thick-rimmed glasses with her hair pulled back tight in a bun. My friends and I would wait for her in the morning so we could walk to school with her and carry her leather schoolbag. It was large and heavy, and it was an honor to carry it. We followed the rules of polite behavior by walking on the left side of the sidewalk, so that she could walk on the right. When we reached the school, she would bend down close to us and say, "Thank you for carrying my bag." She was usually very cold and strict, and we were a little afraid of her, so we liked it when she was grateful and nice to us.
There was a photograph of Hitler - the Fuhrer -- in our classroom where, before the war, there used to be a picture of Jesus on the cross. We had to salute "Heil Hitler" every morning. My father was very angry that we had to do this, saying, "We pray to God, not to Hitler." But if I didn't lift my arm to salute the photograph, I would be smacked with the ruler by the teacher and would not be allowed to go outside at recess.
Gilbert went to the middle school about five miles west in the village of Montenau. In the winter, when the snow was deep, he would go to school on his cross-country skis. During the early years of the war, most of the teachers in Gilbert's school were men, but before long, all the men were drafted into the German army. Soon Gilbert had the only male teacher in the school. They said his teacher had a bad leg, which was why he wasn't drafted. This man was able to keep control and discipline over the entire school. He was tough, and all the children were scared of him.
Gilbert told us that school started with fingernail inspection at 8 o'clock sharp. After that, shoe inspection. They kept their books in a school bag beside their desk, in order by subject. So when the teacher said, "Get your Math book," he could reach down and pick it up without looking. The whole school was very organized and strict. Gilbert didn't like it very much at first, but he got used to it.
* * *
There were not many Jewish people in our village, but the few that were there were told to leave by the Nazis soon after they took over our village. We did not see them after that. Before long, our village was made up of mostly women and children, because many of the men were drafted into the German army. My father and uncles were lucky. Since our Grandfather Georis was born in the old part of Belgium, far away from the German border, the men in our family were exempt from the German draft. However, my mother's brothers -- Jerhard, Nicolaus and Michel Gilles -- who lived in Germany, were drafted by the Nazis to fight in Russia. Many of the men who fought in the German army were not Nazis; they simply had no choice but to fight or be shot.
Families living near the German border were often politically divided; some members supported the Germans, and others supported the Allies. In our village, I'd guess that about one-third of the people openly backed the Germans, and about one-third - including my father - were against them. The rest of the people in the village did not speak of their political affiliation, because no one knew which side would be victorious. They wanted to be safe.
My father was a supporter of the Belgium underground army, but he did not tell us much about this until after the war. Just like there were fanatical Nazis, there were people who were fanatical in their support for the underground. Some of these people would bomb bridges or kill German soldiers, believing they were helping to liberate Belgium. The Nazis responded to attacks by the underground army by punishing innocent civilians - for example, ten civilians might be executed in retaliation for three murdered German soldiers.
My father was not part of this hard-core underground army, but he did take risks to help the Allied forces. His plumbing work would sometimes take him to villages across the German border. Since all the men of working age in Germany were in the army, captured Allied soldiers were forced to work on the farms. Now and then, when our father was doing plumbing work on one of these farms, he would give the French prisoners of war tips on how to escape back to France. He'd tell them the best time to leave or where to cross the border. Of course, even this was dangerous. If he had been caught, there is no doubt that he would have been executed or sent to a concentration camp.
While the Germans controlled our country, listening to radio stations or reading newspapers, other than German ones, was strictly forbidden. Every morning, Gilbert's school assignment was to read the German newspaper to learn of the German army's progress. A huge map hung on his classroom wall, and one student would be asked each day to move the red buttons that indicated the location of the battle front.
The Nazis blocked reception of French and English stations by jamming the stations, making the Allied-supported stations impossible to hear most of the time; however, occasionally, a station called Radio Calais, operated by the underground army, could be picked up in our town.
Even though my father was careful, the Gestapo was suspicious that he supported the underground. A local German sympathizer gave the Gestapo handwritten letters that were sent to German families denouncing the Nazis. Since my father learned to write German in school during the first World War, the Gestapo came to our house looking for him. They took him to their local headquarters and asked him to copy the letters to see if his handwriting matched. It didn't, so they released him, but the Gestapo still came to our house now and then to interrogate our father about his activities and try to find out what he knew about the underground and the Allies.
Beginning in 1942, we would see British planes flying overhead on their way to bomb the German cities. Like everyone in the villages and cities, we were required to cover our windows at night, blacking out all the light to make locating the cities more difficult for the pilots flying overhead. Our father built frames to fit our windows and covered them with black paper. At dusk, he would cover all the windows in the house with the paper-covered frames. Every family in the village did this. At night, someone would walk the village streets to make sure not even a speck of light was visible. If so, he would knock on your door and let you know so you could adjust your window coverings.
After a while, we learned to recognize the different types of planes. One that was easy to identify was the British bomber called the "Mosquito," because of the distinctive buzzing sound it made as it flew. We could hear them fly by in waves of fifty or more planes. The noise would be so loud! When my mother heard the bomb alarm sirens, she would wake us in the middle of the night and lead us into the basement to wait until all the planes passed by. Then we would go back to our beds and get up at seven o'clock, in time to get ready for school. We were so tired after these long nights.
My Aunt Julie was killed during one of these air raids, but she was not killed by a bomb. She was married to our favorite uncle, Nicolas Georis, and was pregnant with their second child. She was on the delivery table at the hospital in Malmedy when the air raid alarms began to sound. All the German doctors deserted her and headed for shelter. Our cousin Robert was born healthy, but Aunt Julie bled to death on the table. At Aunt Julie's funeral, I remember my little cousin, Nicole, reached up and took her mother's hand saying, "Mommy, wake up." Little Robert, her baby brother, was sleeping in a basket beside our Aunt Anna. Her husband had been killed months earlier in the fighting and she had lost her own son when he was a baby. A week later, Aunt Anna, moved into her brother's house to help him, and raised his two children as if they were her own.
The Americans joined the British in bombing the German cities the next year, in 1943. The American planes would fly over in the daytime, like silver birds. We could see the dog fights overhead between the Germans and the Americans. We didn't realize what we were doing was dangerous; we just stood outside and watched, fascinated. If a plane went down, we would go see if we could find it. Of course, we could have easily stumbled on a mine or bomb, but we didn't think of that.
* * *
Like other boys his age, Gilbert was a member of Hitler Youth, which in many ways was similar to the Boy Scouts. Boys as young as six years old were members of the Jungvolk, like the Cub Scouts, but the Hitler-Jugend, the real Hitler Youth, was for boys at least twelve years old. Because the Germans required all healthy boys to participate, Gilbert became a member of the Hitler-Jugend in 1944, the year he turned twelve, even though my father was against the Nazi political views that were part of the organization.
Gilbert loved his Hitler Youth uniform. He had a knife, just like those that Boy Scouts use, except the Hitler Youth knife had a swastika on the handle. On his uniform's belt buckle was the slogan "Blut und Ehre," meaning "Blood and Honor." This is the same slogan that the elite German SS Panzer troops wore on their belts. Clothes, like everything else, were rationed, but each boy received coupons for the summer and winter Hitler Youth uniforms. Gilbert only had one pair of pants that were not part of the uniform, so he - and all the other boys his age - wore Hitler Youth uniforms to school nearly every day.
Hitler Youth meetings were held every Wednesday afternoon. At these meetings they learned the skills that would prepare them to be the future elite soldiers in Hitler's army. They played sports -- track and field games in the summer and skiing in the winter. They learned how to use military weapons, including knives and guns. They learned how to take a grenade apart and how to throw one properly, so that it explodes right as it reaches its target.
Needless to say, Gilbert loved this - all the boys did. They learned about the American-style grenades, called "egg grenades" because of their shape, and the German grenades, called "hand grenades," which German soldiers carried with the handles stuck in their belts. The Hitler Youth practiced throwing grenades in the woods. The boys preferred the German grenades - they could tie a bunch together by the handles and explode them all at once. That was much more interesting than throwing them one at a time.
Gilbert also took English classes at his school. This may sound strange, until you understand that the Hitler Youth were being prepared as the future army that would occupy Great Britain when Germany conquered the world. By the time Gilbert and the other 12-year-old boys became 18 or 20 years old, they would be thoroughly trained and indoctrinated for the German Nazi military and would be fluent in English and German.
* * *
By 1944, my mother was having trouble getting supplies for her store. The Germans were losing power, and food was getting scarce. Since my father had close connections with all the farmers, she set up a bartering system. One farmer traded butter for sugar; another would trade milk for cloth. She kept the store going, even as things got tighter and tighter.
The Germans were being pushed back by the Allies, but I was only nine and didn't think about who was winning or losing the war. I felt very safe and secure at home with my mother and father.
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