My working week became a little bit brighter with a gift from my Secret Santa from the intertubes. Even though my Secret Santa posted this box to me in November from Canada, it only just arrived on my doorstep. It was lovely to find all these tokens from Quebec, especially as Montreal it was a candidate for our new home back in 2008. The package contained many regional bookmarks, a lovely card from Santa, as well as The Shadow of the Wind, Flashman, and a local cookbook with lots of interesting family recipes. Furthermore, some delicious maple sugar, coffee candy, and hot chocolate mix to keep me company when I am curled up with these new novels.

I started Flashman on my metro trip to work this morning, and by 29 pages in I agree with his self-assessment that he is “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady.” I am looking forward to learning about military history from a very interesting perspective, as well as introducing some French-Canadian influences into my Australian-Belgian cooking repertoire.

Thank-you Santa, for sending me some exceptional literary and culinary delights.

This book is written from the perspective of nine-year old Bruno, who has moved with his family from Berlin to somewhere out in the country called “Out-With”. His father is a soldier with a very important job, but Bruno doesn’t like the new house. It only has three stories, and he has no friends to play with. One day he goes exploring, and finds a boy sitting on the other side of a very tall fence. The boy is wearing striped pyjamas, and his name is Shmuel. This is the story of the friendship that develops between Bruno and Shmuel. It is a very simple yet powerful book, similar in some ways to the movie “Life is Beautiful”.

“Who are all those people outside?”

Father tilted his head to the left, looking a little confused by the question. “Soldiers, Bruno, ” he said. “And secretaries. Staff workers. You’ve seen them all before, of course.”

“No, not them,” said Bruno. “The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They’re all dressed the same.”

“Ah, those people,” said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. “Those people… well, they’re not really people at all, Bruno.”

Charles Marden makes a journey from Vancouver Island to Belgium, tracing a physical path that is similar to my own. His story, though, is one of looking backwards for answers, rather than forwards for adventure. It is 1918, and Marden has just received a letter telling him that his son was killed in Belgium. In order to try to make sense of this tragedy, he travels to Belgium to find the last place where his son stood alive.

Marden is numb and unable to comprehend the personal and global tragedies of the war, his loss so great it was impossible for me to grasp. What really shook me were the descriptions of Belgium after just after the war. I have visited these cities, now so carefully reconstructed, and it is so difficult for me to imagine them destroyed. For me, these are sunlit towns filled with happy memories, so to read of their annihilation was like learning of the abusive childhood of a dear friend.

It was like having heard of heaven and hell, and finding out, in one revelatory moment, that this is what they consisted of – not magic zones of fire, not fleecy zones of clouds, but a vaguely undulating series of muddy fields that looked like a lumpy pudding.
“Voila“, Conner said, smiling ironically. “The Western Front”.
…
Back on the island he had has a friend named Andre Slater who had a farm and grew potatoes. It wasn’t a particularly big farm, not by western standards, and yet the battlefield he stared at could have fit inside with room to spare. In the end, it was this comparison that defeated him – thinking how many boys had tried trying to cross Andre Slater’s farm.

Photo from JaaQ

I have just finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece Annie Barrows. It is a series of warm, funny, and beautiful letters that describe the lives of the people of Guernsey during World War II. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands, a British Crown dependency that was occupied by the Germans from 1940 to 1945. With only one day’s notice, many of the islanders sent their children to England for protection. For five years the Germans did not permit any communications to or from the island. Food was scarce, and punishment was common and erratic.

This book is full of stories of human kindness in the face of oppression, of people finding joy in the smallest of wonders. How a little spirit and daring can take a handful of strangers, books, and potatoes and turn it into the formidable Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

”To tell the truth, as long as the Occupation was to last, I met more than one nice German soldier. You would, you know, seeing some of them as much as every day for five years. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for some of them – stuck here knowing their families at home were being bombed to pieces. Didn’t matter then who started it in the first place. Not to me anyway.

Why there’d be soldiers on guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army’s mess hall – children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile – on purpose. They did the same with lumps of coal – my, those were precious when we didn’t have enough fuel left.”

War threatens to rip the humanity from people, to turn them into beasts. Often fueled by religion, it divides the world into “them” and “us”, and declares that we must destroy the enemy at any cost. Today marks the 91st anniversary since the armistice for the cessation of hostilities was signed between the Allies and Germany. Here’s to hoping that some day the human race has enough reason, compassion, and understanding to end all hostilities across the globe.

Photo from Spacmonster