Mind Picker: Suite Française

"Bonjoooouuur, ya cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys!"

-- Groundskeeper Willie

Suite Française is a book that will be forever linked with its history: Irène Némirovsky, a Russian Jew whose wealthy family fled the Bolshevik Revolution, was a successfully transplanted French novelist when WWII first erupted. With her husband and two young daughters, Némirovsky left Paris for the French countryside ahead of the advancing German troops, and from her ringside seat, began writing a novel of the war as it was happening. The book that this eventually became consists of two of the five parts that Némirovsky had planned (her intent was to write it like the five movements of a symphony, and imagine that -- trying to plot out where the climax and conclusion will lie in the events that you are currently living) and it also contains appendices with her editing notes and correspondence.

Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darkness the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Everyone looked at their house and thought, "Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I'll have nothing left.”

The first part, Storm in June, opens on several Parisians who realise that they may have put off fleeing the city for too long: the Germans are approaching; the train stations are closed; the streets are choked with cars and people on foot; and many are left scrambling to pack the belongings they wouldn't want the invaders to get their hands on (so many heirloom linens!). All classes of people are shown, each with their own concerns and prejudices, but they will all eventually learn that the exodus is the great equalizer: when they reach villages that have no food or beds or gasoline, the tired and hungry masses would all fit alongside the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath (although the uppercrusts continue to feel their painful superiority over the lumpen swarms). This section also shows the great concern that many of these people have for their sons or other relatives in the French Army -- often from the point of view of people who had lived through the First World War. When Armistice is declared, there is relief that the refugees can return home and learn of the soldiers' fates.

War…yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to one another. We tell ourselves, "They're just like us, after all," but they're not at all the same. We're two different species, irreconcilable, enemies forever.

The second section, Dolce, is set in a rural village where the occupying Germans are billeted with local families. The youth and friendliness of the soldiers is stressed, and as all of the young Frenchmen are away as prisoners of war, unlikely friendships bloom. Class is again explored here, with life shown from the points of view of the nobility and rich landowners and simple farmers. Eventually, the occupying regiment is called away to the Russian Front.

After this come the appendices, in which Némirovsky makes notes about which parts should be shortened or amended, what her overall goals were (individualism vs communalism), and in her personal remarks describes the real life scene of the German army cutting short a celebration in order to mobilise to Russia -- the scene which essentially ends the novel. It was amazing to me that throughout Suite Française, the Germans were shown to be cheerful and respectful and fully human -- these are not the occupying Nazis that I'm used to from books like Sarah's Key and Half-Blood Blues; I marvelled at how Némirovsky could be so charitable, but I suppose it's more amazing that she didn't mention Jews at all in her book -- the very last of the appendices states she and her family were forced to wear the yellow stars despite having never been practising Jews and being baptised Catholic in France -- and in the end, she captured the universally French experience.

According to the included correspondence, Némirovsky was arrested in a roundup of stateless Jews (she had never applied for French citizenship) and after the last letter of hers is sent, there are a series of letters and telegrams written by her husband, trying to get anyone influential he can think of to try and locate her. Eventually he, too, is arrested and sent to a prison camp, and as is eventually revealed, he follows his wife to Auschwitz, where both were killed. The daughters survived the war -- hidden by their nanny -- and one of them had held onto the leather-bound notebook that contained this manuscript, not reading it until 2005 because she thought it was her dead mother's personal diary.

On their own, the two completed sections of Suite Française don't feel like unfinished work -- they are well written vignettes that tell a story I hadn't heard before. Coupled with the appendices, they become an incredibly important eyewitness account, untainted by what we now know the Nazis were capable of. Maybe, just maybe, the cheese-eating surrender monkey thing is unfair.

As it happens, one of my grandfathers was in France during WWII (the other grandfather was this gentle, tiny man who, no matter how long the war lasted, couldn't convince the enlistment office that he was tall enough to join the fight -- sort of like Captain America). My Grampie who did fight, on the other hand, was a hard man who we didn't know very well, so it wouldn't have been likely any of us kids would have asked him about the war when we were little. Ken, however, once hitch-hiked over to Nova Scotia to stay with our grandparents for a while and he asked Grampie if he had any war stories, and the old man shut him down.

I told my mother about that not long ago and she said, "I think I was the only person Charlie ever liked outside of your father; he would answer any question I ever asked him. Even about the war." This is what she remembered: Grampie was a half Mi'kmaq who enlisted in 1940, and as a non-white, he was segregated with other non-whites (which was very hard on him because one of the few things I knew about Grampie was that he was a nasty racist --ironic, yes). I don't know what he did in the early years, but when the Americans joined the war, Grampie's unit was sent down and blended with an American group of non-whites -- they were called "The Rangers" and were given the crap assignments. I don't think Grampie was there at D-Day (that would have been part of my mother's story, wouldn't it?), but he was with the American army as they liberated France and advanced on Paris. The two stories that she recalled: As the army was sweeping through a small village (not unlike the one in Suite Française, I'd imagine), they witnessed the locals executing one of their own -- with a guillotine. (Could that possibly be true?) And the other story: On VE Day, when all formal fighting was ended and Grampie's unit was sent out to enforce peace and look for survivors on the battlefield, he saw two men stirring in the dirt, obviously both wounded. As he approached, he could see they were a Canadian and a German, and as he got closer, he saw the Canadian reaching for something in his pack. Conflicted about whether to stop the Canadian, Grampie slowed his steps to see what was going to happen and watched in amazement as the Canadian pulled out a bottle of beer and handed it to the German. (And could that possibly be true? I wish Grampie was the kind of man who would have told us his stories himself.)

It's hard to know whether my grandfather was an SOB because of the war or just because. He had married my grandmother before enlisting and she was pregnant with twins before he left. Gone for five years, Grampie came back to two sons he didn't know and, apparently, he was always very hard on them. My Dad, on the other hand, was born in 1947 and treated as well as his parents could afford to.

Meanwhile, my grandmother's brother, my Great Uncle Donny, had also enlisted and was sent to Germany. In 2005, with my father behind the scenes and pushing it through, a cenotaph was erected in Greenfield NS, and Donny was the only veteran of the Great War from this tiny community to attend its unveiling. We were all staying at my parents' house leading up to that event, and one evening, Donny told the following story with great ceremony:

The end of the war was coming and everyone could feel it. We didn't see any goddamn German soldiers anywhere we went and the boys were getting itchy to kill some of the bastards before the whole thing was done. One night, me and a couple guys come upon a farmhouse and the Fraulein couldn't do nothing but let us in. We had been living on rations for weeks and we made her cook us up everything she had, and when she said she had no more, we went through her cellar and took more of what we wanted and smashed what we didn't. We slept there that night, and before we moved on in the morning, I had relieved her of this fine bolt action rifle (Donny unwraps a beautifully carved and engraved, antique rifle). After all these years, I want you to have it, Pat.

My Dad accepted the gun with great solemnity and replied, "One day, this will belong to one of my grandsons." (I'll let the stupid sexism of that remark pass by.)

Also listening to this story was my sister-in-law, Laura: mother to my father's oldest grandson and grand-daughter to a German-born man who fled his native country as Hitler rose to power; a conscientious objector who refused to be enlisted during WWII by the Canadian government and spent the war in a work camp. As much as Donny's story didn't sound to me like something to be proud of, it must have been even more uncomfortable for Laura to listen to -- I can't imagine she'll ever want her son to own that stolen gun and the fear and oppression it represents.

I know we were the good guys in WWII, and I believe it was a war that needed to be fought, but I can't help but contrast my Great Uncle Donny's actions with those of the occupying Nazis in Suite Française -- and of course I understand the differences between the actions of an army that is in enemy territory and might be engaged in battle at any minute (Donny) and an occupying force that is trying to be friendly with the locals, but the terror that Fraulein must have felt with the boorish Canadians trashing her home is the most real part of that story to me.