Aline Soules

Poet and Fiction Writer

World War II

My Mother in the UK, 1939-1940

On the eve of World War II, my mother was engaged.  His name was Richard (I’m not sure of his last name, but it might have been Hudson) and he ended up in the Royal Air Force, not as a pilot, but as an aircrew member in the RAF Bomber Command.  Based on my mother’s age in 1939 (she was born in 1908, so 31), she and Richard must have decided to “wait” to marry until the war ended.  Statistics for survival were slim.  Forty-six percent (46%) of the 125,000 aircrew were killed.  That’s 57,205 men.  In addition, 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 ended up as POWs.  That’s a total of 60% of those airmen.  In June 2012, the Queen unveiled a memorial to them.  Richard was one of the dead.  

My mother was a trained “almoner,” the term in the UK for a medical social worker.  She was stationed in Stirling, Scotland, but periodically travelled to London for her work.  As a result, she experienced some of the London Blitz, which ran from September 7, 1940 – May 11, 1941.  One of her experiences early in the Blitz was meeting the woman who became the main character in my book.  This woman, in the French Resistance, had been “extracted” from France because the Germans were getting too close to her.  “Extracted” was the term used to describe the process of taking someone out of danger, often via plane.  Ironically, there she was, in London, during the Blitz, for “safe-keeping.”  

She had an older brother. The siblings had been born in the same house in the region of Alsace in Eastern France.  Her brother was born in 1917.  She was born in 1920.  The 1919 Treaty of Versailles that officially ended World War I included a section that ceded Alsace and its northern neighbor, Lorraine, from Germany to France.  Between 1871 and 1919, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine had gone back and forth between France and Germany five times.  As a result, no one worried about citizenship because there was constant shifting and there was no point in changing.

When the brother was born in 1917, he was German, as Alsace belonged to Germany at that time.  When the sister was born in 1920, she was French, as Alsace was now part of France (it has remained so since that time).  When World War II came along, the brother was drafted into the German army as a German citizen.  She ended up in the French Resistance.

I knew I could make a story out of this.  

Meanwhile, by 1940, both my parents had lost their partners and had to struggle on through the war with grief in their hearts.  

My Father in Ukraine, 1939-1940

When I wrote my last blog post in mid-February, I had no idea that the Russians would invade Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.  Over the last month, I’ve watched this horror with thoughts of my late father’s experience in the early part of World War II, when the Soviet Union was aligned with Germany.  The Soviet Union didn’t “switch sides” to the Allies until July, 1941.  

Dad was born in Warsaw in 1910 of an English mother and a father who was half Polish, a quarter French, and a quarter Austrian.  His schooling was in Poland, but he went to the Sorbonne for university, probably around 1927 or 1928, and graduated as an electronics engineer in the early days of that specialty.  After graduation, he had his pick of jobs, working for Marconi, designing airplane engines for Rolls Royce, and working for Phillips in Eindhoven.  He also married and had a son, probably in 1931 or 1932.  

By the mid- to late-1930s, everyone knew war was coming.  He signed up, along with many others, hoping to get a “better” spot in the army (whatever that was).  He ended up in the infantry, assigned to communications.  The first thing an army wants to do in any battle or any new place is set up communications and who better than an electronics engineer? His unit and others marched towards Germany in what was known as the “false” war, before the “official” war began, so he wasn’t in Warsaw on September 1, 1939, when German forces bombed Poland on land and from the air.

The advancing Polish forces were driven back and his unit reached Warsaw around Sept. 10.  Every soldier was given two hours to find out what had happened to their families.  Dad had lost his wife, his son, his mother, his father, and, essentially, his country.  I will never understand the level of despair he must have experienced. I do know that, at one point, he stood on a bridge between Buda and Pest contemplating suicide. This confession was one of the rare times he opened up to me about his war life.  Usually, I had to learn about his experiences from others, sometimes other Poles who ended up in Scotland after the war, or fellow-soldiers of other nationalities (French, British), men who became friends in Scotland, where he ended up, where he married, and where I was born.

Dad was sent to the Eastern front in 1939 and captured at Lwów (Polish), Lemberg (German), Lvov (Russian), Lviv (Ukrainian), the town we hear about on the news regularly at the moment because it’s now in Western Ukraine.

Captured and a POW, Dad was put on a train to be taken east.  Because Russia has the widest railway gauge in the world, when a train reaches the border, everyone has to be taken off the arriving train and put on a new train to move further east.  My Dad often said that “there’s no bad time to escape. Some times are just better than others.”  This was one of them.  He took his chance while the POWs were being transferred from one train to another and took off.  

I don’t know how long he was “at large,” having made his way west, but he was captured again, and, as before, he was taken at Lviv.  This time, he must have been watched more closely when the train transfer took place, because he and his fellow POWs were well east of Moscow before they were disembarked and lined up for preliminary questioning.  Their captors wanted to know names, ranks, serial numbers, and what the POWs did before the war.   

Name, rank, and serial number are part of the Geneva Convention, questions they could be asked and ones they could answer.  What they did before the war — that’s another matter.  As the Soviet soldiers went down the line, the POWs invented answers to this last question:  postman, farmer, laborer, whatever.  Dad said “electronics engineer.”  I don’t know what made him decide to tell the truth, but it worked.  They culled him from the others, who glared at him (according to Dad), put him in a locked room, brought him a meal, and left him for the night.  

Dad left.  How isn’t entirely clear to me, but he said he left through the window.  I assume it was locked, but apparently he knew how to open it with or without a lever, a tool, or whatever else he might have used normally. Once out the window, he ran across a field, but he was seen and he was shot in the upper leg. He kept going into the woods on the other side of the field.  

By then, it was late winter 1940 and the Soviet soldiers apparently had little else to do but chase him, which they did for the following six weeks.  He was trapped in those woods, eluding his captors day after day, and his only option for food was to creep out at night and get frozen or rotten turnips from a nearby field.  

As spring came, the soldiers eventually went away, presumably sent to one front or another, and my father, still with a bullet in his leg, began a long journey west, a story for a different post.  

What I took from this and embedded in my novel (I’m still seeking an agent) was the idea of eating turnips.  What prompted Dad to tell me this story was his refusal to eat them.  As a child of parents who’d gone through a depression and a war with rationing, I was expected to eat everything on my plate.  When I saw that my father wouldn’t eat turnip, I questioned this, and that’s when he told me his story.  

 

Writing a World War II Novel Based on a Real Person

I’ve never been in a war, never been bombed, and never been a refugee, but war has been a part of my life since my birth.  Born in Scotland, I grew up with parents and relatives who’d come through World War II and had stories to tell. They were never the stories of hell.  Not because I was a child, but because no one wanted to talk about hell. They were humorous or matter-of-fact or quirky.  These stories were my “norm.” 

I wrote a World War II novel based on one of those stories.  I began when I worked full-time, but as an academic research librarian in higher education, work was ruled by the term and I couldn’t write consistently.  I’d start a new term swearing not to get so caught up in work that I’d have to set my novel aside.  In a couple of weeks, the term subsumed me.  My feet hit the floor at 5:30 a.m. and I’d work all day and into the night, often falling into bed at 11:00 p.m. or later.  At the end of term, I’d collapse.  Towards the end of break week, I’d “come to” and wonder what happened to my story.

Unable to write a novel that way, I left work in August of 2018 to begin again, this time putting my novel first — every day.  The story is based on a woman my mother met during the London Blitz.  No one famous. An ordinary woman coping with what the world threw at her.  I interlaced some stories and events I’d heard as a child, and discoveries from my research.  I finished my novel in the fall of 2021 and began my agent search, which will no doubt be ongoing for a while.

My goal is to share some stories that didn’t make it into the book.  Background stories or stories I cut from my novel because they didn’t serve this particular story.  As I continue my agent search, I’ll share some of these tales in blog posts over the coming months.  I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Why Historical Fiction? Part II

In Part I, I addressed the issue of “truth” in historical fiction, focusing on facts and bias.  I promised to address the “emotional truth” of historical fiction in Part II.  

Emotional truth is about feelings which may or may not have anything to do with actual facts.  An author attempts to convey how characters “felt” about their time and the facts, the research, provides the context for those feelings, whether those feelings relate to the character’s family, historical events, or the character’s philosophical beliefs.  

And that’s the key. How characters face the challenges of their own time and how they feel as they wrestle with ethical dilemmas and make decisions help us to understand issues of our own time.  The distance of history and the mask of fiction enable us to draw parallels to our own time and consider our problems through a new lens.  That’s the joy of both the “history” and the “fiction” aspects of this genre of writing.  

Growing up, I devoured historical fiction.  I read works by Jean Fritz, the American children’s writer of biography and history, and learned about the founding fathers of this country.  As a teenager, I read the historical novels of Jean Plaidy (real name, Eleanor Alice Hibbert) and remember particularly her novels about the Tudor period.  I loved the intrigue and the romance, no matter how badly it ended up.

Now, I read historical fiction all the time.  I still enjoy the adventure and romance, but I value what it teaches me about my own world.  I’ve read a lot of historical fiction about World War II as part of the research for my own novel, as well as history and biography and reports and diaries,  because I wanted to know how other authors present their “emotional truth” of the period.  I want to add my own perspective of that truth, based on what I read and what I learned from the stories my parents and their generation told me when I was young.  

We are at a point where the survivors of WWII are now dying.  Shortly, their time will be fully “history” and we will no longer be able to hear their stories directly.  We will have only written, oral, and media presentations of that time.  This is my chance to add a perspective from what I read and from what I learned from those who lived through that time and conveyed their stories to me.  I want to honor that gift in my work.  I anticipate completing my novel in 2021 and look forward to sharing it with the world, adding my own perspective to the collective view of that time in history.

Image: https://celadonbooks.com/what-is-historical-fiction/ 

Why Historical Fiction? Pt. 1

Copernical heliocentrismI’ve been working on a historical novel set in WWII, most intensively in the last two years.  Why another WWII story? Because I see parallels to our own time, I grew up in Britain in the aftermath of that war, and my premise is based on a “true” story from WWII that was told to me by my mother.

The key is my first reason: parallels to our own time.  George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The challenge, however, is not remembering the past, but figuring it out at all.  As we approach a time when those who lived through WWII are slipping away, and those of us who were brought up immediately after that war and were affected by it, I wanted to explore the war from the intimate perspective of family.

A historical novel is undoubtedly biased and wouldn’t claim to be “true” in a factual sense, although authors of historical novels strive to set their work within an accurate context.  A historical novel presents a view of events that attempts to bring the reader closer to the emotional “truth” of those who experienced that period in history.   Before I address the idea of “emotional truth” in a blog post in a couple of weeks, it’s important, first, to address the nature of history itself.

History is a slippery slope.  Records are lost, suppressed, formally locked up for a certain number of years, interpreted.  Where does that take us?  To bias.  Even primary documents can be biased.  Diaries, obviously, but even a simple factual form.  Someone chooses to check the wrong box for his/her/eir age.  Why?  Vanity?  Fear? Some practical reason? Someone falsifies a document in order to survive; another person is forced to write what a person in power wants to hear.  Who can blame them?  You survive in the moment.  That’s why I often put the word “true” in quotes.  

Our biased behaviors probably go back to the beginning of the human race.  A classic example is Galileo.  He believed the sun was the center of our universe and that got him into trouble.

Enter the Roman Inquisition. In 1615, they decided his belief was heretical because it contradicted the sense of Holy Scripture.  When Galileo defended that belief in print, this was interpreted as an attack on Pope Urban VIII. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found heretical, and forced to recant.  

Why was Galileo was put on trial?  Politics (court intrigue, problems of state) and emotions (anger, fear on the part of the Pope).  The nemeses of historical truth.  

As an addendum, Galileo didn’t originate his belief.  He learned it from the work of Copernicus (b. 1473).  It is believed that Copernicus came to his conclusion independently of Aristarchus of Samos (born around 310 BCE), who probably originated the idea.  So someone knew how the universe was structured centuries before the majority of people accepted it as truth. 

In one way, this pressures a historical novel writer to be as accurate as possible as regards facts.  In another way, the very instability of history gives the historical novel writer permission because “truth” is far from absolute.

Written:  November 17, 2020.  Pt. 2 coming Dec. 1.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism