"Forgive, never forget"

I shall always remember the guardian at the well-kept cemetery at Ivry who showed me the graves of resistance members executed by the occupation forces. 'Even now,' he told me, 'more than thirty years afterward, they have not been forgotten. Look at the fresh flowers.'

Nor shall I forget the lovely lady who lives in a house on the other side of the railway plaza at Antony. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I noticed her husband cutting grass. Across the iron fence that separates the lawn from the sidewalk, I asked whether he had been there during the war. No, he said, but his wife had, and he went inside to fetch her. She had been a little girl in 1940, and she described for me what she had seen. As she recalled the scenes, her voice choked with emotion, and her eyes filled with tears.

I was terribly touched. 'Excuse me, please,' I said. 'I am sorry to ask you about these painful things.'

Tears rolled down her cheeks. She reached out and touched my arm. 'Oh, no,' she said. 'I am glad that they are still remembered. There was glory too.'

I thought of the sign over the door of the memorial to the two hundred thousand French persons who were deported during the war. It says,

'Pardonnes, n'oublies jamais' - Forgive, never forget.

(From the "Author's Note" at the end of "The Vilde Affair" by Martin Blumenson)