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The Lycée During the War Years - Part IAt Schoolby Gabrielle Griswold ('44)We appreciate this fascinating first-hand account of what the war years were like for students at the Lycée. Owing to the unique nature of the Lycée environment, my teenage experience of World War II differed from that of most of my American contemporaries as it was not an exclusively American experience. The war lasted seven years, from 1939 to 1945, and I attended the Lycée from early-September 1938 until late-November 1941, otherwise said from age 12 to age 16. 1938-Before the war During my first Lycée year (1938-1939) when I was in Sixième, the Lycée was only in its third year of operation, a school still small in teaching staff and student body. It felt rather like an extended family, in which everyone more or less knew everyone else. I recall that first Lycée year as one of unmitigated bliss. My joy was unbounded at finding myself in a milieu that combined the best of what I had previously known of France and the United States, and I felt like a pearl in its oyster, perfectly at home, completely comfortable in what I perceived to be my natural element. I fitted in right away, made friends quickly and easily, and loved my teachers. It was a halcyon time. At that time, the war in Europe had not yet started. But awareness of its imminence stared us in the face — earlier and more ominously for us, I'm sure, than for our peers in American schools, because at the Lycée we felt closer to it. While the imminence of war was not a habitual subject for conversation among us students, it did come up occasionally. And certainly there must have been Lycée families other than my own where it was spoken of at home. Earlier, I had spent the year of 1937 in France with my French godmother, and she and my parents had discussed at length the possibility of war before she took me to Cannes to live with her during that year. However, I doubt whether this awareness of impending conflict was as keenly felt by the majority of American families as it was by those of us with strong European ties. America at that time was predominantly insular and isolationist in its thinking, and the prevailing sentiment was that Europe's woes were best left for Europeans to deal with. 1939 - The war After war finally did break out on September 1st, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, the Lycée student body, which until then had consisted principally of French, American and English students, became more international as more students, fleeing the Nazi onslaught, began arriving from other countries, One of the older students, whose name I forget, was a boy from Poland. I only remember that my heart grieved for him, knowing as I did something of the ruin Hitler's blitzkreig had wreaked upon his country. Although I knew him but little, he always seemed a lonely and tragic figure to me. Even before the actual start of war, some students had left for their homelands. My best friend in Sixième, Christiane Donat, had departed with her parents and her older sister, Odile. What impelled their departure, I never knew. Perhaps the family had business or property interests in France which they hoped to safeguard before war came. Although Christiane and I corresponded, for a while, eventually the mails to and from France became erratic, and our correspondence ceased. To this day, I don't know whether or not she and her family survived the war. Some of our professors also left for their native countries. Gladys Peacock, my beloved English teacher, went back to England, and several French-born male instructors returned to France to fight in the armed forces there. Some of the older French students also left — and some (including a son of the Lycée’s founder) would be killed in action. 1940 Then came 1940, a year of cataclysmic disasters as the Nazis subjugated more and more of Europe. I recall one day in May 1940 when Claire Nicholas, a classmate from Holland, arrived at school in tears because her homeland had been invaded. Shortly afterwards a Belgian classmate, Liliane Coppens, also arrived in tears because Belgium, too, had been overrun. I still retain a vivid mental picture of those two in the girls' cloakroom, hugging each other in sympathy and sobbing. Soon afterwards, France fell, the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line no deterrent after all to Hitler's invading forces. The Germans marched into Paris, and the rest of us, who had previously lived in France and loved its people and its culture, were also in tears or near tears, appalled and shaken. Because that war pitted democracies against dictatorships, one of our English class assignments was to write a composition defining "Democracy." For this, we had to compare democratic forms of government with other forms such as totalitarian regimes, constitutional monarchies, etc. I seem to remember that writing this composition was part of a contest, and I believe the contest winner was my classmate, Jacques Changeux, who like me started out in Sixième and somewhere along the line skipped a grade (I skipped Quatrième), so that we both ended up together again in Troisième a year or so later. At home, I remember how reading Hitler's "Mein Kampf angered my mother, and how she filled the white space in the margins of the book with infuriated notations expressing her indignant repudiation of everything Hitler wrote and represented. I also recall how closely my family monitored the war news in newspapers, periodicals and on the radio, listening regularly to foreign broadcasts by commentators like Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer, and Eric Sevareid. We would sit together and shudder at Hitler's screaming, ranting oratations, and revel in the cadenced nobility of Winston Churchill's speeches. At movie theaters, the latest war news was imparted by newsreels, a feature of the times no longer extant in today's cinemas. At school, Hitler was a subject of hatred and loathing, the butt of vituperation, sneers, contemptuous jokes and hand-drawn cartoons. Although we were aware that horrors were unfolding abroad, there was no way we could grasp their full extent. Still, we knew something of them. Many, many years later (in 2002, in fact!) one of my best Lycée friends, Elizabeth Bertol (later Moon, by her married name) would e-mail me as follows: "In school we were citizens of a country at war. We were aware of what was a particularly difficult period in French history. After school, I'd hop on my Fifth Avenue bus, head back home, and notice as I got off in front of my house that there were children of my age playing ball and tag, and I remember thinking to myself, don't they know there's a war going on? But of course there wasn't - we were in the middle of the America First movement when the U.S. was determined to stay out of what [we] considered was a European conflict which had nothing to do with us." Sometimes I felt the same as Lizzie — I daresay many of us did — wondering at the obliviousness of the average American school kid. But even at the Lycée we, too, had our oblivious times. We were young, and the young live in the moment — so, like young animals, we continued to lark about and play, our high spirits seldom dampened for long. For all that, the war was never entirely absent from our thoughts. |
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