: Marty Parkes
: The Children's Front The Story of an Orphanage in Wartime France
: Indie Books International
: 9781957651309
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Geschichte
: English
: 117
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
This story is a true one about an orphanage-Refuge des Petits-in France during World War II. Here, a privileged American man struggled to establish a refuge for desperate children. This shelter provided needy, displaced youngsters with a worthy place in the world-while he found his own. The Refuge would flourish. It played a leading role in what became known as the Children's Front. This book is full of inspiring stories of resilience, generosity, and hope from the staff and youngsters who made the Refuge their home in the early 1940s and later.
Chapter 2
Darkness
I CAME TO KNOW Seymour many years after the events detailed here. He was an elderly man by that time. And even though he was more than fifty years older than I was when we met (now nearly a half -century ago), we nonetheless became good friends. I saw him in person each year, usually in the summer when he came to the US and journeyed from Texas to Connecticut.
During the remainder of the calendar year, we kept in contact as we wrote letters back and forth between Connecticut and France. That was before emails became a thing. So we both sat down with paper and pen and wrote in cursive script the old-fashioned way. To be precise, we did not even use paper. The postal service, in both the US and France, used to sell a paper invention called an aerogram. The document already had overseas postage seals affixed to the outside. When you finished writing your letter, you neatly folded the mailer along its creases, licked the glue provided, and sealed it. Then you wrote the recipient’s name and address on the outside of the mailer on the lines provided. There were also lines in the upper left-hand corner for the writer’s return address.
The paper was a light blue color and thin, but plenty strong. And even after you folded it up into a neat, concise package, the letter was still quite light and thus inexpensive to send. You just dropped the completed missive in a mailbox. Then it would be whisked across the Atlantic Ocean until it reached its destination.
This system wasn’t anywhere near as quick as emails are today, but overseas mailers worked well back then. They allowed one to keep up a correspondence overseas in a cheap and easy way. It proved an ideal system for Seymour and me to cement our friendship and facilitate our conversations.
Back then I wrote by hand in a small, tight scrawl. Although he never complained to me, I will bet that Seymour—at times—had a rough go of trying to decipher my scribbling. Alternatively, Seymour wrote in a sprawling, loopy manner. His letters often ran close together or even into one another. That sometimes made it hard for me to figure out his narrative. As a result, I tended to read his long letters a little bit at a time, usually paragraph by paragraph, spanning a period of several days.
Often I would guess an indecipherable word based on the rest of the contents of a sentence. Usually, my detectiv