… Then - as if this post wasn’t long enough - is the lady we named our daughter Moon Unit after. Not really a relative, but close enough. “Tante Lune” was born and raised in Paris, and became a doctor. She was also Jewish. She met and married close friend of my maternal Grandparents’ after the War and migrated to the US. Tante Lune hardly ever spoke about her war experiences. My Grandmother asked her what it was like in France during the War. “Oh it wasn’t so bad. On the weekends we’d bike out to the country for picnics.” My Dad knew some ex-OSS folks from work, who knew, or knew of, my “Tante Lune” and gave him the straight dope. She had been in the Resistance, and was reputed to be the best pistol shot in Paris. The French Resistance would grab downed Allied pilots and hide them during the week. Then on weekends a “bunch of young people” would bike out to the country “for a picnic”. Sometimes two or three to a bike - times were hard in those days. After dark, at a pre-arranged location, an Allied plane would pick up the pilots, and maybe drop supplies. Then the remaining Resistance people would bike back - fewer than the ones that left Paris.
Of course, if any Nazi soldier had suspected anything, they would all have been shot at once.
“Weekend picnic in the country” my ass!
When the Nazis took Paris she went underground - and I do mean underground. For a time she was hiding out in the sewers, never daring to sleep in the same place twice. All the while taking care of wounded Resistance fighters. Setting up operating rooms in the sewers of Paris. Amazing stuff. She never talked about it - we got it all third hand.
In 1987, she told me and Mama Zappa a couple of stories about her experiences. She said her dog had gone missing right after the Nazis occupied Paris. She and a friend drove all over Paris looking for it, and found it shot in a gutter. By the Nazis.
She told a better story of Liberation Day. As Paris was being liberated, she went to a hospital to help as an MD. In that hospital was her father! He had not been wounded during the war. He was putting up a banner to celebrate the liberation, and fell off the ladder! They hadn’t seen each other through the whole war, and they meet up because of a simple fall.
Tante Lune died at 106. She had dementia the last several years, that was sad. Prior to that she was sharp as a tack - always up on current events, always well read. She did not want people to make a fuss, so she had no funeral. She had outlived her peers, and most of the next generation as well. What I wanted to say at her funeral, and never got the chance to, was the stories above, all about the dear elderly lady who was my “Tante Lune”. Hitler turned Europe into a machine to kill her, and everyone like her - non-German, Jewish, free, or independent-minded - and she was all of those. She not only fought the war, and helped win it, and survived, but she really lived. She lived longer in quiet retirement after the War than she lived before the War. If living well is the best revenge, she had the finest revenge of all. And enjoyed every minute she could.