1944
Bang
She felt the bullet hit her in the back, as she fell to the ground, she clutched the papers to her chest. Her eyes became heavy, her vision went blurry and darkness crept to take a hold of her. "Why the fuck did you do that for?" she heard an American accent scream across the room towards the man who had shot her. The cackle from the man echoed throughout the room, as she took her last and final breath, the darkness swallowed her whole.
May 1940
"Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears. " Margaret Wild, Gone with The Wind (1936)
She was only eighteen when she decided to move to Paris, from Boulogne-sur-Mer, but that was in 1938. Her parents thought she was stupid for this notion, but she decided that she wanted an adventure, a risk and to come back to Boulogne-sur-Mer older and wiser.
She had just turned eighteen, when her grandfather passed away. He had left the family his house and his old bookstore in Boulogne-sur-Mer, her father decided to sell anything the old man had left, as he had flooded her head with stories of daring tales and knights who have to find their way back to their lover. So, the day after her grandfather passed, she packed her suitcase and hopped on a train to Paris, to start her adventure.
Her mother on the other hand had hoped to marry her off to a charming Nazi officer when the girl turned twenty, where she could make an old man happy by giving him pleasure, making his dinner every night and wearing dazzling little dresses to dinner parties, but she wanted to be like Scarlett O'Hara, she wanted to be a warrior.
A few days after exploring the city, she had shacked herself up in a small but cozy apartment just close to the river Seine, the views were beautiful and as she looked outside of her little balcony, she took a deep breath in and whispered "I've made it, mama". She had found a little store next to both a busy cafe and bakery; she knew that she had to start a small bookstore here. It was perfect, she thought to herself. She decided that if things went right, she could collaborate with both the cafe and bakery and be able to help each other out with customers. She had big dreams now she moved to Paris.
A few months after she bought her store, a young slim man with dark hair stood at the doorway, he took off his hat and made his way over to the books that were on the shelf. The young girl saw the man's eyes widen as he saw books such as Shakespeare, Woolf, Faulkner, Wharton and Scott Fitzgereld both in English and in French. That's when she knew she had met the assistant that she was going to hire, even before putting an advertisement in the newspaper.
The young man as she found out was called Gabriel and he was able to speak both French and English and in the end, he decided to give the young book owner important lessons in French so she could pass as a Parisian.
A year later, the young Austrian girl had just turned twenty. That's when Hitler decided to declare war on the rest of Europe. Her mother had sent her a letter asking her to come home and visit them. She refused, or even better every time her mother would send her a letter, she would rip it up and not reply but she knew she had too when her mother kept sending the same letter over and over again.
22nd June 1940, Paris and Northern France became Occupied by Nazi Germany. The young girl was shock, she threw her coffee mug to the floor in the private officer in the bookstore, and ripped out a few pages of Gone With the Wind that she had started to re read again and that was until she heard "Quoi qu'il arrive, la flamme de la résistance française ne doit pas s'éteindre et ne s'éteindra pas", come through on the radio and that's when she knew.
She was just twenty years old when Paris and Northern France became Occupied by Nazi Germany.