Lewis - Moral Law

My cousins and I were, near the gate of the garden of my grandmother, gazing on the sly. On the left side of the dirt road, a fence enclosed the shunting yard of the train station. On the right side, were houses. In each house one after the other, entered a group of three or four Nazi soldiers.

On the road, three Nazi soldiers were slowly walking. They were dressed in dark blue or black: one on the right side of the road, one on the left side, and one in the middle. They carried machine guns barrel pointed toward the ground. We were afraid, very afraid ... we knew those men were real dirty beasts!.

" Those are 'the black ones' said my cousin Maggie," the worst. They are looking for men".

All the men were hiding in the woods. Only women and children remained in the village. My grandmother had just finished to bury the men 's weapons between the rows of winter leeks. It was late August and people had carefully raked their leeks. My grandmother summoned me, and my aunt Adolphine my cousins. They send us to our bedrooms. In every house, women received the SS. My Grandmother and my aunt spoke perfect German. My grandmother was cold and haughty with the Nazis, and let them search the house, and take away the radio receiver.

The Nazi quit the houses and we went to the next one.

My cousin John got a good spanking. He dug between the leeks, and found a "Parabellum" while the nazis were still very close. My uncles covered this Parabellum with fat, so it does not rust. For those who do not know what it is, a "Parabellum" is a very precise German pistol. The presence of this parabellum here would mean that an SS had been killed and swung in the blast furnace of the steel factory; this would proof we were terrorists. In the neighborhood of the train station where we lived, the Marist Brothers organized resistance to the Germans. All my uncles were resistant; resistants were terrorists according to Germans.

The Gestapo have killed as many as fifteen "terrorist" in Athus that day: They wanted to scare the population. It was time that these filthy beasts go back to their country !

Great Uncle Emile was the Athus stationmaster. He had a beautiful purple cap with gold badges. He thought he was an important man: The Athus train station was very important ... Uncle Emile came to the home of my grandmother to announce the imminent arrival of the Allies. They should bomb the train station and metallurgical plant. According to Uncle Emile, American pilots were drunkards and could launch more bombs around than on their target. As we lived very close to the station, we were the intended victims of their mistakes.

He proposed to build a shelter in the garden so we could take refuge during air raids. He would give us enormous wooden beams to cover it. "Built at least two entrances," he advised, " ... if they bomb one of them you can use the other."

My uncles dug a shelter. They placed the beams to make a roof and covered them with clay. Uncle Ernest showed me how to make a lantern out of a candle and a bottle of lemonade. He surrounded the base of the bottle with an oil impregnated yarn, set fire to the yarn and the bottom