On March 8th, women's rights are at the center of the attention. Rightfully so.
But for me, personally, it's also the anniversary of my grandmother's death.
I haven't talked about her much yet since I switched my social media life to Mastodon, so allow me in this thread to remember her, and to tell you why she was an important, if not the most important, female figure in my life.
Sonia was born in 1929 in Metz (France), to a German mother and a Polish father.
I'll give you one minute if you want to do the math on this.
...Right. So obviously when WW2 broke out, and Moselle was annexed by Germany (AGAIN), things were a bit tense.
The way I was told the story (and remember it), her father and her older brother Alfred fled, leaving her mother, herself and her two sisters alone.
Sonia, her mother and her sisters apparently were on the move a lot for a while (until 1943 it seems). As I understand it, they were later caught and sent to a camp.
My grandmother never really used that term however, and certainly didn't expand on it. She'd usually say they were "sent to work".
Recently I have found on this page dedicated to Alfred that the camp was in Silesia. That's all I know. There were many camps there so it's hard to tell which it was.
I'm not quite sure what made this camp "special" (to use the term of the website that mentions it). And I don't know much either about how they got out and rallied France again.
Her brother Alfred entered the Résistance in September of 1944 (not sure about her father, but the page above notes he was sick).
Alfred actually has a plaque in Metz to his name, where he fell when he was 17, two months later. I've never seen it myself but there are pictures of the plaque on the internet, as well as a handful of pictures of Alfred.
It's INSANE how much I see of my grandmother in his portrait, honestly.
Of those few years, I don't know much more. The only thing she'd easily mention about it was that this part of her life caused a huge religious heartbreak for my grandmother.
When she was younger, Sonia was raised Catholic, and wanted to become a nun. But she said that she had seen too many Catholic clergymen/nuns cooperate with the Nazis during WW2, and so, as a teen, she decided to become a Protestant.
That meant giving up on becoming a nun, and so, she needed a new plan for the future.
When she was 16, she decided to join the Red Cross in Metz (I believe she mentioned having lied about her age).
Her job as a secretary was mainly to work for the department of the Red Cross dedicated to searching people who were looking for family members whose trace was lost during the war. Metz was a major train station through which a lot of people transited back into France at the time.
After a while, she met a guy.
Against her mother's recommendations, she decided to marry him.
The way she used to tell it, Sonia KNEW he was wrong for her, she KNEW her mother was right, but... she was too proud to admit that she was wrong, and so, she married the guy anyway.
It's possible that this was the hindsight talking, of course !
He WAS, in fact, a bad husband. He cheated on her a lot, gambled a lot, and quickly made sure to get into a lot of debt.
Meanwhile, Sonia had my mother in 1954 (...nobody's perfect), and tried to keep her marriage going despite all its issues.
...That is, until the pride kicked in.
Sonia ended up throwing out her husband when my mother was about 1yo. She'd had it, enough was enough, she preferred to be on her own.
To which Grandpa Screwup basically replied : "oh, that's it, huh ? That's what you want ?! ...Alright."
And he disappeared into thin air. No divorce, no nothing. #MenAreTrash
By the way, do you know what happens when a gambler in severe debt falls off the the face of the Earth, leaving a legally wed wife at his last known address ?
Oh yeah. THAT happened.
My grandmother was under legal obligation to pay back all his borrowed/lost money.
Now, again for the cheap seats : it was the mid-FIFTIES, she was a woman in her mid-20s alone with a toddler, and she was drowning in debt.
But this was a woman who had survived so much already, and this was not gonna stop her.
So, get this : Sonia got THREE jobs and raised my mother on her own (although after a few years she was sent to a Protestant boarding school).
She'd work as a secretary for the Red Cross during the day, would then work as a personal secretary for a General she'd type documents for in the evening, and then at night, she'd work at the Metz train station, where she would sell sandwiches to the travelers (there were lots of them, especially from the military because in the 50s it was a hotspot for military service, I was told), pushing a cart twice her size from one platform to another.
And all of that with, famously, just one meal a day (since all the money went to my mother), made entirely of bread smeared with mustard and dipped into her morning coffee.
And that's it.
Let's make one thing clear : my grandmother never bragged. She was proud, which she'd freely admit to, but not trying to tell self-aggrandizing stories.
She would explain that in the most matter-of-fact possible way.
There was no "look how bad I had it" in her telling of all this. There was no "life was so hard for me that you can't complain".
It was just her lived experience (potentially embellished by time, but I dare you to cast any stones). Which, to me, makes it even more impressive.
Oh, you think that's it ? No, that's not it.
When my mother was about in her early teens, Sonia ended up finding Grandpa Deadbeat.
See, she had paid all of his debt back (mostly because she legally had to, but also because of the damn pride). What she wanted at this point was a divorce. She spent a good chunk of the previous years looking for the guy in order to get rid of him for good, and she found him eventually.
And so, she got a divorce IN THE SIXTIES, which were not exactly a fun time for divorced women if you're wondering.
But she got Grandpa A**hole to sign the divorce papers, and her life got considerably better for it nonetheless. Which speaks volumes about how bad things had been until then.
And now, let me introduce you to the "awwww" portion of our story.
The one that really would make Hollywood producers go "nah that's too much, we can't sell that".
Before she got married, Sonia kinda fell for Mr. Right... and Mr. Right kinda fell for her (it makes marrying Grandpa Jerk even more puzzling if you ask me).
Except she was getting married and so was he.
(ah, there it is)
Over the years, they crossed paths a few times, but she was married and so was he. And also she clearly had bigger problems than her love life (re: Grandpa Dudebro).
But apparently Sonia and Mr. Right kept meeting by accident, and they were solidly in love as years went by.
When she divorced Grandpa Loser, Mr. Right's wife started having (or already had them ?) mental health issues, the details of which are unknown to me. So he decided he couldn't divorce her (and my grandmother was VERY adamant that you never date someone who's married, no matter how "separated" they are).
That is, until the wife eventually passed away. By that point, both Sonia and Mr. Right were in their 50s.
I personally don't remember Mr. Right, and have seen only a couple of blurry pictures, of which I have been left none. Apparently he was a loving surrogate grandfather.
He never had children himself and was reportedly enamored with Baby Me. Hey, someone had to be.
Together, Sonia and Mr. Right traveled A LOT. To his house in the mountains, to various places in Europe, but also to Tunisia, which made a HUGE impression on my grandmother.
She spent some time there and decided to read the Quran, and, you know, see what would happen spiritually from there.
Sonia apparently came pretty close to converting, although that didn't happen in the end (for reasons forever locked away).
She's the only person I've ever met who by the end of her life had read all the major holy books, and could quote them on occasion.
Alas... just as Sonia and Mr. Right were finally planning on getting married and spending the rest of their complicated lives together, Mr. Right had a heart attack and died.
And, I sh*t you not, on Christmas. I know it sounds unbelievable but I've seen Sonia burn a candle for him all day every year, so I know it was not just storytelling.
In her 60s, Sonia eventually retired (after 40+ years of working for the Red Cross, helping separated families, but also various refugees... so you know, no big deal).
She moved out of Metz for the first time since the end of WW2, to live closer to her damn daughter, and to help her raise us.
She lived in front of the kindergarten my little sister attended, and close to my school. So after school, we'd go straight to her place for a couple of hours every day.
She'd give us snacks (...and would let me snack on her leftover pasta, which I suspect she'd eventually cook just for me knowing that I prefered savory stuff to sugary snacks), would play games with us, would talk.
She was very good at talking, I just wish I had been better at listening.
Sonia was my own personal hero as a kid and a teen. She was the only one who'd take me out of that f*cking house to show me the outside world. To show me that there even was a world outside in the first place.
She took me and/or my then-sister (sometimes both, but usually alternating) on vacations. Showed us the sea and the ocean.
I don't have a lot of good memories of my childhood (I don't have a lot of memories at all). But the good ones were always related to her.
Told us all these amazing stories about her f*cking incredible life, some of which I did, sadly, not commit to memory the way I should have.
Tried to speak some German with me which she had learned from her mother (my ex-sister never learned German).
Told us about Tunisia, and in general all the things that she had learned while working for other (oftentimes richer) people.
Read books. All the times, books. Books books books. She had tons of them.
Bought her first TV in her 60s and fell in love with #MurderSheWrote.
She also followed the Ramadan public service TV shows, that she said would air at night (I've never seen one, but she was adamant they existed on French TV in the 90s).
Was open-minded as f*ck when as a teen I considered maybe converting to Judaism (I eventually didn't, though).
Was the only person in the entire world who listened to my experiences of child abuse and never shut me up. Granted, she never got me out of there permanently (although she said she almost did, once), but just listening was gold to me.
While in high school, I was probably the only 15yo happily running to her grandmother's weekly to have our lunch.
After I moved out of my parents' at 18, she was the only person who cared to come to Paris once a month to have dinner with me, and care about how I was doing after my suicide attempt at 19.
Every month we'd go to a restaurant for a different country.
She never went "oh come on now, I survived WW2, a camp, a religious conversion, a gambling husband, crippling debt, no eating, single motherhood and the death of my true love". Not once.
If she ever thought it she at least never let me see it.
We urged her to write her memoirs, but she never got around to doing it. You can see how what little I remember of her life story would have been an amazing thing to tell the world.
Also my ex-mother, being her sole child, inherited all of her photos and papers. I don't have much left from her in that department. Lots of stuff is missing from her life story, that I'll never know about.
And then came March 8th, 2006. The stupidest sh*t.
She fell on the floor of her bathroom. Couldn't get up. Spent a few hours there until my then-sister found her.
Sonia was brought to the hospital and she spent, I believe, a bit over a week there. Half-conscious on her better days.
Things went downhill pretty fast.
Had all kinds of machines around... She stopped eating. She stopped everything.
I think the pride kicked in again, and she didn't want to live like that, to be treated like that, to be seen like that.
My then-mother said she had refused to see me. A few months prior, we'd had a fight, and my ex-mother said that Sonia was still mad.
I try to believe it was not just that. I try to believe she didn't want me to see her like that.
One afternoon my then-mother let me come to the hospital. I stood a few meters away, in the hospital's hallway, seeing Sonia from afar through a window. That was the last time.
Sonia turned her head, and almost saw me, but my mother told me to hide. So I hid and... I'll never know if it'd been ok to say hello anyway. To say sorry anyway. To say thank you anyway.
I wanted to stay. I was unemployed at the time, I could easily have stayed there, you know...? To be with her when ?
My ex-mother didn't let me. She instructed the nurse to call her when Sonia would go, or later the next morning if she'd leave during the night.
And that was it. She was left there. The woman was a force of nature and she died all alone.
