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Echoes of World War II: Eighty Years Later
It is a beautiful spring day in Le Havre. Birds are singing, and sunlight streams through the window, casting long shadows on the building across the street, just like a scene in an Edward Hopper painting. The days are getting longer now. It stays light well past 8 p.m., longer than it ever did in California, where I lived for twenty-five years.
Last week, on May 8, Victory Day in Europe was celebrated in France with a grand ceremony on the Champs-Élysées. The television showed motorcycle parades, military officials on horseback wearing golden helmets, and President Emmanuel Macron in attendance. I had seen him here in Le Havre last September for the commemoration of the city’s Liberation Day in 1944.
Yesterday evening, on my way to the beach, I came across one of the Stolpersteine, the small brass memorial plaques created by German artist Günter Demnig to commemorate persons persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime. This plaque was one of twelve placed in Le Havre in 2022. It pays tribute to David Fourmann, born in Paris in 1913 to Ukrainian-Russian Jewish immigrants. He was arrested in Le Havre on February 26, 1942, just three days after a Resistance attack on German soldiers. His arrest was part of a retaliatory roundup by the Nazi occupation forces. Civilians were taken hostage in response to the attack, with execution threats intended to prevent further Resistance.
Fourmann was imprisoned in Rouen, then transferred through Compiègne, Drancy, and Beaune-la-Rolande. On July 18, 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz II–Birkenau on Convoy No. 57 and registered as prisoner No. 130586. Later, he was sent to Jaworzno, a subcamp of Auschwitz, where prisoners were forced to work in coal mines under harsh conditions. He died there on January 1, 1944, according to the testimony of a fellow prisoner and friend, Simon Fdida. Fourmann’s name appears on the Wall of Names at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, as well as memorials in Le Havre and at the Beaune-la-Rolande camp. Just a few days ago, I had photographed Simon Fdida’s Stolperstein without knowing about their connection. Fdida survived and was liberated by the Red Army. The plaques commemorating these two men are placed just fifteen minutes apart, on the same street, but on opposite sides.
There is often an emphasis on heroism, victory, resistance, and liberation when discussing World War II ceremonies, as if everything ended definitively through military action. The reality is more complex. For many of us who inherited the World War II trauma, true victory and liberation never fully arrived.
This is perhaps why the words of Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV are so soothing. Although I am not Catholic or religious, their language offers an alternative grounded in peace and the refusal to justify violence as a response to violence.
I have turned inward, trying to understand why I feel so strongly about all this. Perhaps it is because I sense the bombs as if they were dropping on me. This is why St. Joseph’s Church in Le Havre has come to feel like a place of healing. The church was rebuilt by Auguste Perret and stands as a landmark to remember the loss of human lives during the bombing. I recently sat there, looking up at its 107-meter tower, built on a square in the shape of a Greek cross. Light filtered through Marguerite Huré’s stained-glass windows in shades of pink, gold, orange, blue, and green. Solemn music played, and tears came to my eyes.
The death of innocent civilians is always a tragedy, regardless of nationality, religious background, or ability. Even the deaths of soldiers who are forced, coerced, or pressured by political leaders who live in comfort and safety feel morally troubling. This is why the church moves me so deeply. It stands like a lighthouse, visible from many places in the city. At the same time, I thought about the victims of the Nazi Aktion T4 program, who were not officially recognized as victims of National Socialism until January 29, 2025. Can you imagine? It took eighty years and the efforts of many people, including the German organization Lebenshilfe, to achieve that recognition. I feel such a deep sense of injustice.
The path to the atrocities of the Nazi regime began with a mixture of eugenics, the instability of the Weimar Republic, and the blame placed on Germany for World War I in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles. Economic hardship and national humiliation fueled extremism and the rise of National Socialism.
Mother’s Day had just passed. This year, it was celebrated last Sunday, May 11, in the United States and Germany; on March 30 in the United Kingdom; and it will be celebrated on May 25 in France. As an international person who has worked and lived in each of these countries, it can be a bit of a juggle to keep up with the different dates. Honestly, for me, every day is Mother’s Day. I don’t care about official days, but let my heart guide me. If it says give her flowers today, even if it’s not Mother’s Day, I will do so anyway. Most often, the flowers are fresher.
I’m not a mother myself in a world that glorifies motherhood. Well, what can I say? Yet I did spend time thinking about my mother in the context of World War II. She was born in 1940, a refugee child living in poverty, in inadequate housing, without proper nutrition. Her lifelong insomnia may have come from the maternal stress during my grandmother’s pregnancy and her early childhood experiences during World War II—experiences that, at the time, received little attention. Today, refugee children in Germany receive all sorts of support, including horseback riding lessons.
She later became the mother of three children in postwar Germany, including my younger brother, who suffered from multiple disabilities and a type of epilepsy that could not be controlled with medication. The cause of his condition was never clarified. He died at the age of 32 in a country that had once declared people like him unworthy of life. My mother raised him in a society where former Nazi doctors such as Werner Heyde, Kurt Borm, and Werner Catel continued to hold positions of power. Where then is the liberation? Where is the victory?
Deep in thought, I tried to picture Le Havre in 1940 when German forces occupied the city. That was the same year my mother was born, right after my grandparents had to leave Hoffnungsthal, a small village near Odessa, in today’s Ukraine. I have those parallel scenes in my mind. I see them taking off, my grandmother highly pregnant, she being born in a hospital in Romania on this long journey on horses and wagons, while in a different part in the world, there is Le Havre, a strategic naval base and part of the Atlantic Wall. German troops built bunkers, machine gun nests, and anti-aircraft batteries and took control of key locations, including Fort de Sainte-Adresse. I also see the 300 Jews who used to live here in the district around the Notre Dame Cathedral still visiting their original synagogue. Some may have received letters from loved ones in America who were able to leave on the cruise ship Normandie to New York City, while Fdida and Fourmann were captured and deported. Does everyone see things so vividly as I do, I wonder?
At the same time, I see my father’s family in Berlin. There is his mother, my Oma Greta, whom I have never met, who attempted suicide and was taken away by her own mother, and nobody knows what happened to her then. I picture her in her apartment, trying to cut her veins with my dad and his brother, as small children witnessing her. He was raised by his grandparents in Berlin-Köpenick, experiencing the bombings by the Royal Air Force in Berlin. His grandpa was a physically impaired World War I veteran. His life was also shaped by Berlin-Köpenick coming under Soviet influence, escaping to the West before the wall was built, the one that separated him from the people who raised him.
Then there is Operation Astonia, the assault by the British 1st Corps to retake Le Havre in 1944, which resulted in the near destruction of the city. About 80 percent was reduced to rubble, thousands of civilians were killed, and hundreds of ships were sunk. I try to picture the German soldiers being treated in the bomb-resistant underground medical facility, and how the British officer and playwright William Douglas-Home was imprisoned for refusing to participate in the bombing because French civilians were not evacuated properly beforehand.
At the same time, I see the grey buses picking up people deemed unworthy of life, taken daily to Germany’s six killing centers to be gassed, some begging the nurses, not wanting to board the bus. Then, the sermon by Bishop Clemens von Galen to stop it.
My mind suddenly drifts to the Wannsee House in Berlin. I picture the high-ranking Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann, meeting there on January 20, 1942, to plan the Final Solution and discuss Operation Reinhard. In my imagination, they briefly decide which personnel from Aktion T4 will be sent to Poland. All of this history feels very close to me—I see it like a film.
Oh my gosh, it is already afternoon. The sun has shifted, and I am still sitting here. I have not eaten anything yet.
Before heading out, I look again at my brother’s medical records from the epilepsy center in Kork-Kehl, where he was first treated. Not long ago, I learned that a total of 133 people were sent from there to the killing centers.
I reread a letter from one doctor to another in the year 1982. It mentions Luminal, a medication that was used to overdose some of the euthanasia victims. I examine the dosage. It looks small, and then I reread what happened to my brother afterward. About three months later, he had a status epilepticus, a life-threatening condition. I remember those days, my mother sleeping with him in the hospital, doctors predicting he would not survive puberty, and a math teacher telling me I had too much self-pity when I sat in the classroom with tears in my eyes. I used to put my feelings into my piano playing. Now I don’t have a piano anymore.
The records I received only go up to 1983, although my brother lived for two more decades. Although the doctors seemed to be very careful in their experimentation with different medications and doses, what strikes me is the language used in those files. I stumbled upon the words unclear etiology and eugenics.
I go over the passage of a letter again where one doctor urges my parents to institutionalize my brother, and recall our hesitation. Another letter describes my mother as overly protective, dismissively labeling her as decompensated, and how the entire family fell apart because of my brother’s condition. Not a single word about getting us horseback riding lessons, creative writing courses, art therapy, or verbal self-defense courses.
On my way to the supermarket, passing Rue Victor Hugo where the new synagogue stands, I see St. Joseph’s Church reaching into the sky like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, and I think—buildings can be rebuilt, but their true value comes from the lives lived around and inside them, while humans simply cannot be replaced.
