Book Description

Early on the morning of May 10, 1940, twelve-year-old Marguerite Thill was awakened by the cries of her father warning the family that the Nazis were about to invade their country of Luxembourg. By that evening, Marguerite Gretchen, as she was called her three sisters, and their parents had donned several layers of clothing and left on foot, along with hundreds of others, to escape into France. This marked the beginning of an amazing odyssey. For the next three months, the family lived as refugees, trying, sometimes without success, to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. They slept in filthy barns, acquired lice, went without food and water, and huddled in ditches while bombs fell around them. Once the French government was able to establish some organization, Gretchen and her family were transported to Montbard, where they were placed into the home of two elderly ladies who had a spare room. Just as they had begun to feel safe and relaxed, they were moved to the tiny village of Cruchy, where they were placed into a house that had not been inhabited since WWI. When a troop of German soldiers took partial possession of the house, Gretchen's father quickly developed the habit of sleeping with an axe at his side, the only method at his disposal to protect his wife and four daughters from the German commander sleeping in the next room and the soldiers in their tents pitched in the orchard just outside. Throughout their enforced travels, Gretchen and her family beheld gruesome images of corpses, blood-drenched streets, wounded war horses, a mother killed with her baby's carriage still at her side. When the family was able to return to Luxembourg, it was to a homeland which would remain occupied by the Nazis for the next four years. Swastikas draped every building. German troops goose-stepped down the streets. Speakers broadcast Hitler's speeches day and night. Nazis stood at the back of the church, once a place of great comfort, to ensure the priest said nothing against them. Along with the rest of the nation, Gretchen and her family had their fuel and food severely rationed. Allowed little more than was needed to survive, they were often hungry. And as was not unusual in that time and place, Gretchen had adult expectations placed upon her: holding a baby pig while a farmer slaughtered it so the family could have some meat; standing in line all night at the local butcher for a pound of horse meat; acting as her family's look-out while her parents listened to anti-Nazi BBC; sneaking food to Luxembourg boys who had gone underground. Growing into young womanhood, she weathered every hardship with the quiet courage that would come to mark her generation. Four years and four months after her nation's flight into France, the Allies liberated Luxembourg. The Thill household became a favorite visiting spot for the American G.I.s as word had spread that Madame Thill spoke English. The soldiers brought gallon cans of food, and Gretchen was introduced to peanut butter. At the age of seventeen, she began working at American Headquarters in Luxembourg City, where she met an American soldier whom she soon married. She then joined the thousands of other war brides who sailed for America. She and her new husband settled in his hometown of Duluth, where they started living a life of selfless hard work so their children could grow up to enjoy lives that would not include fear or hunger. Gretchen would never again feel the ground shake with cannon fire, but her memories of a life interrupted by history would remain with her in the form of that quiet courage which has always allowed her to stare down tragedy.