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Memorial Day has just passed, and I am reminded of how many of our Modern Memoirs book authors are veterans, especially from the World War II era. But WWII veterans are elders now, firsthand stories sadly becoming a fading resource. The late André A. Crispin, a native of Belgium, came of age during WWII but wrote his memoir later in life, in the 1970s. He turned to handwritten journals from his time in pre-war Belgium, his involvement in the Belgian Resistance, and his eventual volunteering in the Belgian army. After the author’s death in 2012, his brother submitted the manuscript, and the memoir was published a year later.
Below is an excerpt and photo from a chapter entitled “In Hiding in a Country Grain Mill.” It takes place in 1943 Belgium, where André was a 19-year-old engineering student at Louvain. The occupying German government mandated that first- and second-year college students “volunteer” to work in a German factory for 6-month stints. To avoid this, André fled to a small town and found work in a flour mill, hiding out in the owner’s farmhouse and working in exchange for room and board. He writes about secretly helping his uncle in Resistance efforts:
Uncle Gust was a Belgian National Railroad employee all his life until he retired. The railroad administered the rationing system under the German directives and organized a food procurement for its employees. They bought staples, including wheat and rye, in larger quantities, hence at prices well below black market, and made it available to employees at cost. But grain had to be milled before it could go into consumption.
Uncle Gust was in charge of procurement of staples, among other goods. Transportation and processing had to be cheap and clandestine. Naturally, he knew where I was [at the mill] and asked me to help. On several occasions, he arrived after dark with a big van full of 50-kilo sacks of wheat. It all had to be milled by dawn…. The truck had to be unloaded and sacks carried to the third floor, where the grain intake was located, as it worked its way through the machinery by gravity.
Being in the dead center of the village, I couldn’t operate the hydraulic lift, which consisted of a steel chain pulled through a rotating clutch that made an awful racket capable of waking the whole neighborhood. So the bags, all 110 pounds’ worth, had to be carried up the stairs. Uncle Gust could not help and his driver didn’t offer. In addition to the three steep flights of stairs, it took a mighty heave to swing them back on ones's shoulders.
It was a good night’s work, followed by another day, with an hour’s rest in the morning, maybe. But it was a rewarding task to know that a great number of people benefited, that I could help my favorite uncle in his arduous assignments, and that these truckloads of wheat would escape requisition by the Occupant for consumption in Germany.
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