Tag Archives: World War II

September 28, 2025 · 1:00 am

Passage to Marseille

“Passage to Marseille” film poster, Copyright believed owned by Warner Bros. which produced and distributed the film, Source=http://www.dvdbeaver.com/FILM/DVDReviews25/passage_to_marseille.htm |Portion=All |Low_resolution=Yes |Purpose=Used i

There is an old Humphrey Bogart movie called Passage to Marseille. Set in WWII, the film was released in 1944, when the outcome of the war was still in doubt.  France, at the time, was still under the Vichy government which had collaborated with the Nazis.

The character Bogie plays – a journalist imprisoned for opposing the Nazis, who later becomes an airman fighting them – dies at the end.  But a moving letter written to his young son is read beside his grave.  This is the letter.

“My dear son, today you are five years old, and your father has never seen you.  But someday, in a better world, he will.  I write you of that day. 

Together we walk, hand in hand.  We walk, and we look.  Some of the things we see are wonderful, and some are terrible.  On a green stretch of ground are 10,000 graves, and you feel hatred welling up in your heart.  This was.  But it will never be again. 

The world has been cured since your father treated that terrible abscess on it with iron and fire.  And there were millions of healers who worked with him to make sure there would be no recurrence.  That deadly conflict was waged to decide your future. 

Your friends did not spare themselves, and were ruthless to your foes.  You are the heir of what your father and your friends won for you with their blood.  From their hands you have received the flag of happiness and freedom. 

My son, be the standard bearer of the great age they have made possible.  It would be too tragic if the men of good will should ever be lax or fail again to build a world where youth may love without fear, and where parents may grow old with their children who are men who will be worthy of each other’s faith. 

Take care of your mother, Jean.  I hold you in my arms.  I kiss you both.  May God keep you and love you, as I do.  Good night and au revoir, til our work is finished.  And until I see you remember this:  France lives.  Vive la France!”

We are supposed to have built that better world.  But the sin nature of mankind never changes.  Darkness is again rising.  And evil takes many forms.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must not give up the fight.  It may not require iron and fire of us.  While we have breath, however, we must strive with all our might to teach them right from wrong, and truth from lies.  Flawed as we all are.

Only when Christ returns will the work be finished.

—

[1]  Wikipedia, “Passage to Marseille”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_to_Marseille. 

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September 15, 2024 · 1:00 am

The Rose Garden, Chapter 5 – World War II

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Displaced_Persons_and_Refugees_in_Germany_BU6635.jpg

Displaced Persons Camp (1945), Hamburg, Germany, Source/Author Imperial War Museum for UK Govt., (PD)

WARNING:  Graphic Images

“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6: 11).

It is difficult to reconstruct the chronology of World War II from my parents’ notebooks.  I can only cobble together bits and pieces.  The times were chaotic.  Territory repeatedly changed hands.  My mother’s narrative is particularly fragmented.

My father saw farms abandoned or destroyed by artillery.  Bridges that had stood for generations were demolished.

Food grew scarce.  Livestock were confiscated without pay by passing troops or slaughtered  outright.  My father took a beloved horse up into the hills, in the hope of finding him again someday.

Two of my father’s brothers and an uncle were forcibly conscripted.  A second uncle was arrested for transporting contraband.

One of the conscripted brothers was finally reunited with the rest of the family in Germany in 1949, having been captured on the Eastern Front and imprisoned by the Russians all that time.  He was a shadow of his former self.

My father, also, witnessed Jews being deported to concentration camps by the Nazis.  He wrote in his notebook:

“The curse was on.  We saw the Jews from Yugoslavia by the thousand[s] in barbed wire wagons, their tongues on the windows and yelling, ‘Water, water!  Please!’  They threw beautiful money, the Yugoslavian dinars, and we picked it up.  This is [the ugliness of] war.  We were children and did not know any better…

[There were] also, German army trains by the dozens going to Yugoslavia fighting partisans.  On their way, [the soldiers] were shining sitting on their tanks, autos, trucks, etc.  On their way home, [they were] filthy, ragged, and flea [bitten].”

My mother was eleven years old when in 1944 the Nazis occupied Hungary.  The war abruptly ended her schooling.

My mother had a personal connection to the Jewish deportation.  The kindhearted woman who ran the local grocery — a woman who had let my mother stand on the counter, when she was a toddler; the very woman who had inspired my mother to dream of working in a food store — was Jewish.

That woman came under cover of darkness to the house one night, and begged for help.  All my grandmother could do was give her some food, and a little money.  The woman was never heard from again.

My mother and her parents, themselves, had to flee to the nearby woods for safety as first Nazi forces, then Russian forces swept through their area.  For a brief time, they went into service in a neighboring village.  But they were never permitted to reclaim their property, so were left homeless.

Expulsion

When Russian forces came through, one of my grandfather’s sisters falsely accused my grandmother of collaborating with the Nazis.  This was the result of a long-simmering grudge related to my great-grandfather.  Promising the village a financial windfall, he had decades earlier left for America with the village’s funds and never made restitution.

It was in this connection, as I understand matters, that my grandmother’s retention of the family’s Hungarian passports saved them.

As Germany’s defeat neared, the USSR urged a plan to evacuate ethnic Germans from Eastern European countries, as an excuse for land redistribution [1A].   In Hungary, many refused to leave the only home they had ever known.

A series of expulsions began in 1946.  As a result, 170,000 German Hungarians were ultimately transported to the American Zone in West Germany; 50,000 to the Soviet Zone in East Germany; and 15,000 to Austria [1B].

Both my parents experienced being transported by cattle car.  The trauma affected my mother so deeply she was unable to speak for a full year afterwards. Continue reading →

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September 8, 2024 · 1:00 am

The Rose Garden, Chapter 4 – Eden

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Yellow_Chrysanthemums.jpg

Yellow Chrysanthemums, Source https://flickr, Author Joe Lewis,
(CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic)

“The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed” (Gen. 2: 8).

I am told that at age three I was fearless — routinely toddling along in determined search of adventure, several steps ahead of my grandmother.

Roses

One particular day our path took us past a neighbor’s rose garden.  Evidently drawn to the blossoms, I entered the garden before my grandmother could stop me.

Entranced by the glorious shapes towering above me, I was only vaguely conscious of the heated discussion which ensued when the agitated neighbor rushed anxiously into her yard in defense of the roses.

At that moment, roses — in all shades from ivory to crimson — served to form one of my earliest recollections.

The Bronx

The Bronx is not widely known as a bucolic setting.  A borough of New York City originally named for Dutch settler Jonas Bronck, the Bronx by the 1970s had become a nationally recognized symbol of crime, urban poverty and decay, renowned for burned out buildings.

I was unaware of this growing up.  For me, the Bronx was host to a series of botanical marvels as cherished and familiar as family members.

A Peach Tree, An Apple Tree, and A Pear Tree

To begin with, there was the peach tree in the backyard, valiantly brandishing its fragile petals each spring.

Near that were the brilliant azalea bushes, and the apple tree whose graceful branches stretched past my second floor bedroom window.  Many a daydream was lazily conceived in view of those branches.  A stunted pear tree completed the picture.

Little did I realize that the peach, apple, and pear trees were mere shadows of the lush orchards my grandfather had to leave behind in Hungary.

The Neighbors’ Yards

In the next yard over to the right behind the house reigned a majestic oak, which in the summer months provided both shade and support for a hammock.  I was permitted to use this hammock when on speaking terms with the boy next door — the hammock, a definite incentive to peaceful coexistence or, at any rate, the temporary cessation of hostilities.

The oak truly came into its own in the fall at which point it dropped bushels of acorns before entirely losing its leaves.  The boy and I fought jealously over ownership of the fallen acorns while our fathers — from a rather different perspective — fought over the leaves

The yard to the rear and left of the house was occupied by our Italian neighbors’ carefully cultivated pepper, zucchini, and tomato plants.  Though looked upon with disdain by my Hungarian grandmother, these always grew with abandon.

Adjacent to them, in the yard belonging to my great aunt, grew hydrangea bushes with the mysterious ability to change from pink to blue depending on whether pennies or nickels were buried at their base by attentive children.

Two stately fir trees and a holly bush marked the boundaries of our small front yard.

An Extraordinary Woman

My Spartan grandmother’s garden, however, dominated the yard.  Her garden was one of the few indulgences Grandma allowed herself.  That she could allow herself anything approaching indulgence — given the many hardships she had known — was a testament to her strength.

My grandmother was an extraordinary woman.  In Hungary during World War II, Grandma had survived invasion first by German then Russian armies.  At risk of her life, she disobeyed a Nazi directive and avoided shipment to Siberia.

Though aware that the possession of Hungarian documents was cause for execution under the Nazi regime, my grandmother retained the family’s Hungarian passports throughout the Nazi occupation.

When Russian invaders supplanted Nazi, she was able to produce these passports.  From among some seventy-five persons, only my grandmother, my mother (then still a girl), and two or three others successfully avoided deportation to Siberia. Continue reading →

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