Since the beginning of this pandemic, we often hear the claims of the word “freedom”. Now I wonder if people really understand what that word means. Perhaps we have known too much freedom to be able to understand what lack of freedom really is.
Posted at 12:00
I am fortunate to have a mother who is passionate about history and who herself lived through significant moments of the past. She has always shared them with me and this is what allows me to keep an open perspective on the situation we are currently experiencing. I would therefore like to share with you one of his writings. Maybe it will make it easier for you to get through some days.
“A memorable day in August 1944. Paris has just been liberated! The French are finally breathing after long years of German occupation. Day of jubilation! “
“I just turned 4 and I’m jumping for joy today, I can’t say why if not that I want to be part of the collective euphoria that has just gripped all the adults around me. “
“We kiss, we sing, we cry with joy, we congratulate each other, happy to have survived the deprivations, the police raids, the bombings. The Americans have just chased the Germans out of Paris and everyone’s lips there is only one word: freedom. For the little girl that I am, it doesn’t mean much since I was born during the occupation, it was even a German doctor who gave birth to my mother, but all the same, it must be really important so that everything the world seems so happy!
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR
The author’s mother, on the lap of an American soldier in Paris, in August 1944
“And as happiness never comes alone, here suddenly, at the end of the street, Americans appear, mounted on their huge tanks which creak the cobblestones of our little street, they smile, they wave flags and all our neighbors rush to their doorstep to tell them how much we love them. They stopped in front of the porch of our building, perhaps by accident or quite simply because there was a kid in a white dress with two big knots in her hair who was looking at them… In any case, I don’t know how. really happened, but I vividly remember finding myself perched on this war machine, on a soldier’s knees, enjoying my first piece of American chocolate! It was necessary to immortalize such a moment. So here are the tenants of 19, rue Le Bua, surrounding two of the American soldiers: my father, my mother, Mr.me Thiébaut and his three daughters, Linette, Paulette and Lucie, and, of course, me and my chocolate in the arms of one of the heroes of this day. ”
Today my mother is over 80 years old. She is no stranger to the duty to adapt and this pandemic has required her to make new adjustments, but it has not slowed down her creativity, her curiosity and her freedom for all that. She can’t go sing at OM, so she rehearses at home; she cannot go to see her family and friends in France, but she talks to them on the phone. In short, when my mother was little, she did not lack freedom because she did not know anything else. Today, she does not lack freedom because she knows what it is to lack it.