Guest post written by author Kristin Beck
Kristin Beck has been captivated by the often unsung roles of women in history ever since growing up hearing her grandmother’s stories about her time as a WW II army nurse. A former teacher, she holds a BA in English from the University of Washington and a Master’s in Teaching from Western Washington University. Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two children. The Winter Orphans is out September 13th 2022.
I grew up about an hour and a half from my grandparents and was lucky to see them often. My grandfather was a big man who pretended to be strict, but was actually soft hearted and indulgent with his grandchildren. He had a large vegetable garden and doted on his tiny dog, Button, who he took to local hospitals to visit patients. He made a famous minestrone soup, handed down from his own depression-era parents, and something called rusks which, by all accounts, came from the war. When he passed away, my grandmother’s house must have seemed very quiet, so she often came to stay with us.
I was a teenager during those years, and my grandmother was petite, talkative, and charming. As time marched on she became increasingly confused, which would eventually lead to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Early on, she simply told her stories again and again, punctuating them with both laughter and tears, seemingly forgetting that we’d heard them before. Still, I listened. Now I’m so grateful that I did; as the fog of dementia descended on my grandmother, clouding her short-term memory, most of her stories arced back to the war.
My grandmother was a nurse with the Canadian army, which made her a lieutenant on the Western Front. She lived in England before following the army to France in the aftermath of D-Day, working in tent hospitals across Normandy. As the front line moved north into Belgium, my grandmother went with it. There she met and married my grandfather after a six-week romance, which, in my adolescence, astounded me.
“Six weeks?” I’d exclaim, and she’d smile.
“Well,” she’d remark, “It was a different time.”
Listening to her, I eventually came to understand what she meant.
“Normandy looked like the moon,” she’d say of her first months in France, and I would try to imagine it: the cratered land, the bombed villages, the devastation. She recalled the people still living there, surviving amid the wreckage. Sometimes local children were rushed to medical units when they’d encountered the enemy, which occasionally came in the form of undetonated explosives. My grandmother shuddered at the memories.
When she spoke of field hospitals, what often surfaced was her impatience with the mud. It covered everything: the ground, the aisles between cots, the patients themselves. She described filling her helmet with water to give herself a sponge bath, a stolen moment amid the chaos. She remembered the urgency of incoming patients, the way they flooded the wards and were laid outside under open sky when the tents were full.
Her stories about working on hospital trains often revolved around a particular soldier who sang through his journey. He was gravely wounded, yet he sang one song after another as the train rocked through a long, dangerous night.
“He had a lovely voice,” my grandmother recalled, pausing as she folded a pair of pants, her gaze suddenly far away. I tried to imagine it from the other side of the laundry pile: a dying man with a beautiful voice, my grandmother as a young woman tending to him, both of them shuttling through the darkness of a world at war.
She worked in a facial ward in France as well, but she wouldn’t speak of that posting. Her mouth became a tight line at any mention of it, and she would shift to stories of Belgium. There, she and her colleagues, some of whom she wrote to all her life, transformed a bombed-out veterinary clinic into a medical unit. She remembered, with distaste, that there were taxidermy animals mounted on the wall. I imagined the eeriness of their eyes staring down on a ward full of injured men, forever frozen.
While in Belgium, my grandmother met my grandfather, who was a captain with the American army. He spoke far less of his experiences, but the stories that emerged were horrific. When I look at photos of him in his uniform, I recognize the smile in his impossibly young face; it remained boyish until he was an old man, a grin that bubbled up into his eyes. I always found it difficult to imagine his gentle, youthful countenance amid the atrocities of the battlefield.
My grandparents married in the city of Ghent, clad in their uniforms, and my grandmother explained how people threw rice as they emerged from the church. Seconds later, more people appeared, hungry and frantic, kneeling to sweep it up. She once told me this story while we were in her bedroom, and I stood in front of the framed photo of her and my grandfather, smiling in their uniforms, looking both stunningly young and happy.
And that’s what surfaces now, all these years later, as I consider my grandmother’s past: her life in the war involved staggering contrast. Within her memories there was horror and tragedy, yet there were also moments of joy. There was hope and humanity.
I believe the humanity of such stories is what makes them so resonant all these years later. My grandmother sparked my fascination in World War II, especially concerning the untold contributions of women, and so I’ve gone looking for similar hidden tales. Courage, My Love, my first novel, explores the incredible role of women in the Italian resistance. My new novel, The Winter Orphans, follows a group of Jewish refugee children who escaped from Austria and Germany on the eve of war, and the real women who fought to save their lives.
Though these histories are fundamentally different from my grandmother’s experience, some of her words come back to me, again and again, as I write. “It was a different time,” became her refrain, and now I try to imagine all she meant by those simple words.
It was a time when you married the man you loved in mere weeks, because he might not live beyond them. It was a time when soldiers died in the mud, when children lost their families, when home became a memory. And yet, it was also a time of improbable goodness, and unimaginable bravery.
The Winter Orphans is a tale of goodness and bravery, and like all stories of heroes, it’s shot through with hope. The people populating the novel’s pages, and the real figures behind them, accept grave danger in order to save lives. Like my grandparents, and so many other heroes of World War II, they were ordinary people who responded to extraordinary times with courage and fortitude.
Perhaps, like my grandparents, these heroes eventually grew old and obscure. Perhaps they had a tiny dog like Button trailing them in the garden, or a famous soup recipe, or they repeated themselves over and over again as their minds failed. Perhaps the people around them would never imagine what they’d lived through, and never hear the incredible stories spooled in their memories.
This is why I’m forever grateful that my grandmother opened a door to her past and let me look in. She ignited my imagination and my admiration for women like her, with remarkable and unexpected histories just waiting to be found. It is an honor to bring them to life once more.
