My French is improving but I have a long ways to go before I’ll be able to tackle my newly acquired version of Democracy in “America” by Alexis de Tocqueville.
My french penpal, told me the French had bought out all the iodine from pharmacies in France when the Ruskies bombed the protective shell of Chernobyl and the new Nuclear plant that produces 25% of the Ukraine’s energy. I appreciate her sharing her French point of view on the unfolding disaster. Iodine helps the body get rid of nuclear contaminants. She is not that far away from the crime but then again, with Putin waving his Earth destroying nuclear weapons in our faces We in the US aren’t but minutes away from it ourselves.
She also recently wrote a long piece in response to a despairing French language post about the Ukraine which she shared with me. I had to translate it to fully understand it. Here is what my friend wrote, first in French and then in English:
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Der des Der I had to look it up to learn its meaning but I suspected it had to do with Woodrow Wilson’s call in the first world war to fight a war to end all wars. Der is short for derniers….or last or latest. As the French suffered an even more brutal invasion by the Germans twenty years after the invasion of 1914 “der des der” became an ironic term.
Here is the Google translation into English of my friend whose family lived near the Rhine when the German’s took the northern half of Germany and controlled the south, Vichy, with French puppets.
“Our generation and those who follow us had forgotten it”, write Bernard.
I am Lorraine (and Mosellane) and Lorraine and Alsatians have not forgotten what war is, the brutal invasion, the loss of loved ones and property and the expulsion ordered by the enemy for those who did not want to fall back under the yoke of the invader and accept German nationality.
Then the exodus with only one authorized suitcase, to the south and west of France, having left everything behind.
Even if I did not experience the war of 39/45, nor that of 14/18, my parents and grandparents were forever marked by these years of war.
“In 1918 they said it was the “Der des Der”!
And peace returned and carelessness.
Then the amazement of a new attack only a little more than 20 years later…
This is why we have a duty to remember so that the younger generations do not forget, so that they know what were the sacrifices of their ancestors so that we can all live today in a free country, and that they understand that nothing is ever certain.”
