Lucien's Story. Read the Review. I am eleven years old. Tonight, on this twenty-fifth of November, , I am with my mother in our apartment in Paris, on the rue Francis-le-Pressense, in the 14th arrondissement, and night is falling. Soon it will be time to go to bed. My father is not with us. Years ago he went off to war with the glorious French Army.
They dug trenches near the Maginot Line, they lay in them until the month of May in , and when they heard a shot fired, a single shot, they picked up and marched off. They marched for three days and three nights. The fourth morning they halted because they were already encircled by the Germans. Since then my father has been a prisoner of war. We write to him each month, and each month we receive word from him. Our letters are censored; all we can say to him is that we are all right, that we love him, that we are hoping to see him again soon.
His letters say the same thing to us: that he is all right and hopes to see us again soon. From one letter to another the only thing that changes is the date, which is the only thing that matters: on that date he is alive, we are alive.
It is better than nothing. His way of waging this war is a disappointment to me. I would have preferred him to have halted the Germans, to have prevented them from occupying France. I won't find this out until a lot later, but I'll say it right now: my father doesn't mind it too much in his prisoner of war camp; he is making out all right. The Germans are taken up with getting themselves killed on the Russian front, and it's the women who are cultivating the fields and keeping the factories going.
The women manage as best they can, but the machinery doesn't always respond as it should. That's where my father steps in: he repairs the tractors and the harvesters, repairs the radios, the bicycles, the sewing machines and typewriters; he plugs holes, fixes leaks, and replaces fuses. Along with his skills as a mechanic, he speaks fluent German, like every self-respecting Hungarian, and acts as an interpreter when necessary.
