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My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England. Ordinary citizens hid him in their homes, fed him, disguised him, sheltered him from the Germans. Many families willingly hid Allied aviators, knowing the risks--they would have been shot or sent to a concentration camp if they were discovered by the Germans.
In 1987 the town in Belgium honored the crew by erecting a memorial at the crash site, where one of the ten crew members died. The surviving crew were invited for three days of festivities, including a flyover by the Belgian Air Force. Over three thousand Allied airmen were rescued during the war, and an extraordinary, deep bond between them and their European helpers endures even now.
My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any fiction until I started taking a French class. Suddenly, the language was transporting me back in time and across the ocean, as I tried to imagine a tall, out-of-place American struggling to say Bonjour. Barney had a vague memory of a girl who had escorted him in Paris in 1944. He remembered that her signal was something blue--a scarf, maybe, or a beret. The notion of a girl in a blue beret seized me, and I was off.
I had my title, but I didn't know what my story would be. I had to go to France to imagine the country in wartime. What would I have done in such circumstances of fear, deprivation, and uncertainty? What if my pilot character returns decades later to search for the people who had helped him escape?
Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge, both sobering and thrilling. I read many riveting escape-and-evasion accounts of airmen and the Resistance networks organized to hide them and then send them on grueling treks across the Pyrenees to safety. But it was the people I met in France and Belgium who made the period come alive for me. They had lived it.
In Belgium, I was entertained lavishly by the people who had honored the B-17 crew with the memorial, including some locals who had witnessed the crash-landing. I was overwhelmed by their generosity. They welcomed me with an extravagant three-cheek kiss, but one 90-year-old man, Fernand Fontesse, who had been in the Resistance and had been a POW, planted his kiss squarely on my lips.
In a small town north of Paris I met Jean Hallade. He had been only fifteen when 2nd Lt. Rawlings was hidden in a nearby house. Jean took a picture of Barney in a French beret, a photo to be used for the fake ID card he would need as he traveled through France disguised as a French cabinetmaker over the next few months.
And in Paris I became friends with lovely, indomitable Michèle Agniel, who had been a girl guide in the Resistance. Her family aided fifty Allied aviators, including Barney Rawlings. She takes her scrapbooks from the war years to the schools to show children what once happened. "This happened here," she says. "Here is a ration card. This is a swastika." She pauses. "Never again," she says.
The characters in The Girl in the Blue Beret are not portraits of actual people, but the situations were inspired by very real individuals whom I regard as heroes.
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