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Pascal_slith -> RE: True WWII story (9/9/2011 11:17:29 PM)
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This is a great thread. Lots of stories worth telling.
My family is from Switzerland so my grandfathers were both mobilized and spent the war sitting along the frontier looking at the Germans on the other side (they were both non-comms in the cavalry).
However, on my mother's side, my grandfather and the family lived in a farm about 500 yards from the Swiss-French border. Once in a while, either a Frenchman or Allied pilot/airman and sometimes Jewish refugees would get across and give themselves up to the Swiss border agents to be 'interned' for the military/resistance (which actually meant either a nice camp or doing voluntary work) or put up in civilian housing for the refugees. My grandfather's older sister was the canteen head at one of these internment camps, where there was a smattering of Poles, French, and Czechs (she actually had already done this in WWI).
One story I heard from them and a few from their generation was that the Allies would call up shortly before the passage over Switzerland of Allied bombers to indicate the altitude they would fly at. The Swiss AA would then fire so the shells would not go further than 3-5000 feet below the bombers.
My wife is French and Belgian so she has family with very different experiences. Her maternal grandfather was a chemical engineer and a manager at the Belgian chemical firm Solvay. He was also part of the Belgian resistance, regularly sabotaging production of the chemical plant he worked at with his fellow resistance employees. Well, someone, most likely an employee, denounced his activities sometime in 1942 and he was picked up a first time by the police. For lack of evidence he was let go, and promptly went back to sabotaging production. He was denounced again in late 42 or early 43. This time the Gestapo picked him up. He was sent to a concentration camp with 50 other Belgian resistance people (yes, resistance people were regularly treated to the concentration camps). Either the second or third camp he ended up in was Dora. Dora, which was mainly underground, was the production facility for the V-2 rocket (thus he was sent there because of his chemical engineering background though he didn't do that there). He found himself there with French, Dutch, Belgian, Polish etc. prisoners under concentration camp/slave labor conditions. He told my wife and others in the family that those that died the quickest under these conditions were either under 30 or over 40 (too young psychologically or too old physically). He was 30-something at the time. He also said the worst of the prisoners in terms of relations with other prisoners were the Poles.
Of the 50 that were sent with him to the camps, only he and two others made it home in 1945. He left weighing about 80kg (176 lbs). He returned weighing 35kg (77lbs). He did live until the late 90's but the only child born to him and his wife after the war (their fourth; the three others were born before he was picked up by the Gestapo) was deeply autistic, so you wonder if there wasn't some ongoing effect from his passage in the camps.
My wife's father, his parents and his siblings, though French were living in Brussels at the outbreak of the war. Sometime during the period 1940 to the invasion of the USSR by Germany, he and his siblings (all children at the time) got into the grounds of the Soviet embassy in Brussels and stole the big Soviet flag. Their mother used it to make clothes for the brood of children for the duration of the occupation. For those who know European comics, they lived in the same building as the creator of the Tintin series, Hergé. He would regularly show his latest pages to them to see their reaction.
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