here is the full aticle ...without pics..
Friday, May 30, 2008
Surviving Nazi rule
Didier's father risked his life for risistance
by Cid Standifer
Friday, May 30, 2008
Marcel Didier's earliest memory is from when he was three years old, growing up in the capital of Luxembourg. One night he made the mistake of opening the front door of his apartment building to look outside after curfew.
"I was curious about what was going on at night," he said. "Somebody saw me. A Nazi soldier storms into my house."
The Nazi chased Didier down the hallway and into his basement, where he pointed his rifle at the child and shouted at him in German. At the time, Didier spoke only Luxembourgish-a mixture of French and a Germanic language. After a few minutes, the soldier left, and Didier ran terrified upstairs to his family.
When Didier, now a Galena resident, lived under the German occupation, curfew was written in stone. No one could so much as open a curtain for fear that light would be visible to Allied bombers and cause an air raid.
"They had rules, and they lived by the rules," Didier said. "Either you lived by the rules or you died."
He was one year old in 1940 when the Germans rolled into Luxembourg. Didier says he remembers relatively little of what happened during the ensuing four years before the Americans drove the Germans out, but he still has the stories that his father, Pierre Didier, told him when the war was over.
Pierre owned a bicycle shop beneath the family's apartments. Unbeknownst to the Germans, he spent the war years providing bicycles to transport resistance members to bordering countries, smuggling notes from France in tires and frames, selling cigarettes on the black market to fund the movement, and harboring Jews, American soldiers and other resistance members in the family's home.
The family didn't know any of this either. Even Didier's mother Marie was kept in the dark.
"She was deathly afraid of Dad taking chances," Didier said, "but she had a hunch that he was doing stuff." She kept a few bags packed in case the family was shipped to a concentration camp.
And they came close. At one point, the Nazis caught wind of the cigarette business Pierre was running. Without warning, a car pulled up with around 20 German soldiers who surrounded the house. But they found nothing.
"He had just sold his last pack an hour before," Didier said. "He was surprised that the commanding officer, the captain, seemed relieved. . .He told Dad, 'Better watch your friends.'"
"Why, we don't know, but there's humanity after all among the bad guys."
Didier's uncle, Albert New, was not so lucky. The movement was so secretive that neither Pierre nor the rest of the family even knew that he was involved in resistance activity, but one day New didn't come home from work at the railroad. His name was later found in a registry at the Birchenau concentration camp.
Not all of Pierre's secret charges made it either. Pierre told his family that he had "lost" the key to a room in the house, but after the war revealed that a steady stream of people had been secreted away there. Some were in the process of fleeing the country, so Pierre would send them off to their next destination with fingers crossed and no way of knowing their fate.
The methods were risky. A common trick was to hide people in carts of hay crossing the border. The Germans were well aware of the tactic, and rather than taking the trouble to search a haystack by hand would stick a bayonet in to see if it bled. Pierre discovered later that at least one of the people he hid disappeared in route to the next safe house.
All the while, the family had to keep up appearances of conceding to the occupation. Didier described how they would pretend to salute by waving one arm out half-heartedly. As long as there was movement, the Germans didn't notice the difference.
Pretending was harder for Lucien, Didier's older brother, who was going on 12 when the occupation neared its end. He was forced to join the Hitler Youth, and had to go out and collect donations for the Third Reich. Some people would toss in a few pennies to keep on the good side of the occupiers, and Lucien handed over his paltry earnings at the one meeting he attended.
"He always skipped," said Didier. "He didn't realize how dangerous that was, to not go to a meeting. And our parents didn't want to force him to go."
Fortunately, the Germans were too preoccupied fighting a losing war to go chasing after truant children.
Didier remembers the night, September 10 of 1944, when the city fell to the Allies.
"(The Germans) were setting up barricades right in front of the house. We were sure that they were going to make a stand there," he said. The family hid in the basement, sure that an Allied bombing would strike the area.
"All of the sudden, it turns quiet-'cause nobody sleeps on a night like that-and then we hear them rumbling out of town."
Pierre slipped out of the house and went to meet the U. S. Fifth Armored Division as it rolled into Luxembourg. He carried an American flag with him.
"How my dad got the U. S. flag, nobody knows. He wouldn't tell us," said Didier.
The liberation was young Didier's first encounter with the Americans. "I was five years old, in awe of America, not just for the sake of the liberation but for the majesty and the magnitude with which they moved around town," he said. After five years of strict rationing under the occupation, the Americans threw food and chocolate from their trucks. "It was like Santa Claus coming to town."
Luxembourg wasn't out of the woods yet. The Germans regrouped to the north and launched a counterattack in December that became the Battle of the Bulge, the most costly battle the American Army fought during the war. Didier recalls sitting on the roof of his house with his brothers watching American planes drop supplies to isolated ground troops.
Pierre had come above ground after the Americans took Luxembourg, and the family knew that if the Germans returned, they would have to flee with the retreating Allies. Fortunately, the offensive failed, and the Third Reich fell soon after.
After the war, Pierre turned to his business. He joined up with a manufacturer based in Pontiac, Mich. to make "Whizzers," or motorized bicycles. He worked in distribution until 1954, when the company decided to pull out of the business. They offered him a job in America instead.
"He asked his three boys, 'Would you like to go to America?'" recalled Didier. "And the answer was a unanimous 'Yes.'"
It took two years for the family to get visas. When they were finally approved, Lucien stayed behind in Luxembourg to make his own way for a few years, but the middle brother Paul found work in America, and Didier started attending an American high school, though he dropped back a year to work on his English skills. He then went to University of Detroit, and once he graduated was offered a job by the Chrysler Corporation.
While there, Didier met a woman named Joy who worked in a different department. The two were married in 1972.
Didier would tell Joy about memories he had from the liberation, and she would pass them on to her father, who was a part of the American Army. They began to notice strange similarities. Didier recalled sledding with G. I.s in the winter of 1944, right at the time when Joy's father was there.
Of course, there's no way to be certain. But Didier says he's 99 percent certain the two met that year. "What does it all mean? I don't know. Fate? It's just kind of a neat story," he said.
picture: Dad holding the US flag; Pokie is the middle one of the little guys up front, on the right...with my head turned toward the crouching girls...