Lightcudder wrote on Aug 8
th, 2010 at 6:06pm:
Don't take offence please Normandie! Only joking... honestly!
S'okay! I'm not French.
But around here, in the midst of D-Day landing beaches, WWII cemetaries and ugly towns that are only ugly because they were bombed into oblivion pre-D-Day and in the weeks of fighting afterwards and then quickly re-built to provide instant housing with no regard to aesthetics, you do appreciate that the French lost a lot during WWII. As did other countries, of course, but there's often a sense that France went through the war relatively unscathed because of the early surrender.
Fifty thousand
civilians were killed in these parts during the bombing and fighting. The average French person's response to the American, Canadian and British visitors who come here now is that the civilian losses in Normandy were the price they (the French) had to pay for regaining their liberty and honour. Even now, we know French teenagers who talk about
"the Allies giving France back to them" with tears in their eyes.
Not all of France was badly affected by the war - though I'd never downplay the psychological impact of being invaded by another country - but the French in Normandy suffered.
Many of the men still alive who remember the war either as kids or adults tell of how they (or their fathers and uncles) were conscripted to work on German farms (in view of the fact that most German men were fighting the war) and some of the stories they have to tell are spine-tinglingly awful.
They were forbidden to speak French in Germany - or they'd be shot. Many of them had to walk home when France was liberated... Frankfurt to home for one of them was 500 miles. Some of them were so traumatised by things they witnessed and preventing themselves speaking French that even when they got home they found they had developed a mental block and didn't dare speak their own language.
I do tell anti-French jokes, and they do make me smile - and most jokes are based on some reality - but some of France suffered a lot and around here you can't help being aware of that.