~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Books and movies about World War II have invited me in since I first fell in love with Iowa native William Schirer’s writing. He was a correspondent in Paris and then Germany for the Chicago Tribune, among other media. He eventually worked with Edward R. Murrow, stationed in London with CBS, in setting up reporters working throughout Europe to broadcast the war news to America via Murrow.
From the mid-1920s to 1940, Schirer covered the increasingly sickening programs of the German ruler Adolph Hitler storm trooping Europe. When Schirer was secretly informed that the Nazis were going to kill him for his clever way of outsmarting the censors every time he telephoned Murrow in London, he left Berlin.
In “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” “Berlin Diary” and “Twentieth Century Journey,” all books full of his news briefs as well as his personal life, Schirer was one of the premier reporters and eloquent historians of his century. In his covering of the “peace” signing between Germany and France, Schirer, who stood only feet from Hitler, wrote of him, “…his face afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.”
This is a face we are familiar with today.
Because of Schirer, I moved on from war novels and histories to WWII Resistance stories and memoirs, mostly from France, where thousands, ashamed that their government kissed Hitler’s boots, formed secret groups of retaliation against the murderous German leader and his insolent, thieving occupation troops.
Much of Resistance activities involved hiding Jews fleeing from the terror of a dictator crazed, intent on killing all Jewish people. Hitler snatched them in every country his army entered and systematically “disappeared” them after he broke down their doors, burned their books, torched their businesses and threw them in cattle cars on trains bound for hell. Approximately 6 million old people – grandparents – and parents and little children of Jewish families that had lived for centuries in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Luxembourg were never seen again.
I watched a movie recently called “Number 24” about the Resistance in Norway. Its main character is a young man, Gunnar Sonsteby, whose secret identity is Number 24. Aided by the British and a Norwegian banker, he comes to lead the silent and seething loathers of Nazis in Norway. These are individuals who find each other simply in quiet conversation about their anguished longing for the taken-for-granted freedom of their former life as Norwegians.
It hit me in the heart and the gut, for it is a true story and its scenes have to do with citizens snatched off the streets or out of their homes or places of work. Chillingly familiar. It’s on Netflix.
