You all are reminding me of a story our Mom told us when we were all kids.
She was a WII war bride; a French native living in Paris whom my father met at a Red Cross dance pressing through from Le Havre into Germany.
She lived in Paris throughout the 5 years of German Occupation. She didn't like talking about the war. But sometimes she did:
- Before the German Wehrmacht arrived in 1940, a Jewish family emigrating out of Poland moved into her building. They were apparently trying to get out of Europe to the U.S., but at the time Paris was as far as they could get.
- The Wehrmacht arrived, and things were not good but people talked to each other and did what they could for one another in spite of circumstances.
- The concierge in her building had a boyfriend who worked at the local police station of her arrondissement (her neighborhood). He warned the concierge that the Germans (the "Party" Germans my Mom called them, the Nazis), had discovered this family through records and meant to come "get" them that night (everything was done at night for terror effect apparently).
- So the boyfriend passes on the word, and the concierge herself passes on the warning to the family. The children got the word while at school and never came back to the apartment (whatever happened to them though she didn't say); and the father got the word at work and also stayed away that evening.
- The mother and grandmother though apparently came back to the apartment to try and grab things (clothes? furniture? mementos? I don't know). and while they were there the soldiers arrived. My mom talked about the sound of the jack boots on the stairway, and then the screams of the women.
- It is a horrible story.
- My mom never learned what happened to everyone in that family. The war was like that evidently, everybody doing the best they could for themselves and looking out for others when possible, but they were bad times; hard times.
They wanted their "things". Hard as it is; like TechnoWeenie says, sometimes dropping everything and just running is the best thing you can do for yourself.
