Adriane's Heritage

While writing my more ambitious novel, Adriane, one part of the story led me to research the Spanish Civil War. Because Adriane is French, with a Basque heritage from Southern France that crosses the Pyrenees into Spain, I wondered about her father and mother's involvement during that period. I am an amateur history buff, especially the histories that are not covered in the mainstream. In this case it is the popular resistance movements against Fascism in France and Spain.

   I grew up in a working class neighborhood in the 50's. Every boy in that time would ask each of his buddies; "What did your dad to in The War?" meaning, of course, WWII. There wasn't anyone among my playmates whose father hadn't been in the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps. My father has been with Patton in the Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge and had witnessed the atrocities at Buchenwald. I wondered too what French kids of that era asked of their friends. I could imagine that they too asked each other the same sort of question.

   The involvement of the Resistance that secured Southern France, before the sands of the beaches of Normandy were soaked in the blood of our fathers, is a history that escaped my attention previously. As I researched the French Resistance of WWII an awareness lit up the role of the Basques of Northern Spain and Southern France during and after the Spanish Civil War...  and even during and after WWII in the form of what the post war media called Basque Separatists in Spain. It was no small matter that I found that the Basque regions of Southern France were completely liberated from the Nazi Occupation before the Normandy landings.
 
   This research has been stalling the writing of Adriane but the trade-off has been rewarding. It is a rich history that has had the affect of nothing less than awe in my mind. It has taken me through the agony of Europe from Spain to Poland but my story concentrates on characters from Southern France and Spain.

   I should add that my own ex-mother-in-law, Lucyna Radlo (nee Kocharski), had participated in the Polish resistance in Warsaw and at 15  her father was one of those lost in Auschwitz and she was interred in one of Hitler's munition factories along with her mother. She wrote about it before she passed away in her account; Between Two Evils. Her experience is fodder for another story.