I hope my stories do not bore you. All I say here did truly happen to me and has shaped my way of looking at things for the better and the worse. I changed names of people for the sake of privacy, just in case they, or their descendants are still alive and are offended. Of course, maniacs such as Hitler has existed. It is hard to believe that the human race can repeatedly produce, monsters of the sort, but let's not forget that these monsters are mere puppets of worse monsters who work in the shadow. They keep popping up around the world: in Brazil, in Argentina, in Saudi Arabia, in Russia and in Rumania. However I did not write this book to give a lecture in world affairs; I wrote it to give a voice to all the past, present and future war children who number in the millions, in Syria, in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia, and sadly here in North America, particularly with the Black and Indian children. To do so, I returned to my three-foot tall self when Europe was ablaze. I was a privileged child to be born in France, for I could have been born in Poland or Russia or Germany where I probably would not have survived unless my parents would have been clever enough and wealthy enough to escape to more hospitable horizons. This is not meant to be a sob story, for as a child this was my world and I just saw it as a matter of fact, nothing before and nothing after. Only the present counts for a child. When sad, the child is sad forever, even if in grownup time it only lasts ten minutes. There is no chronology in this work, because a child does not have a sense of time, or rather the child has a different sense of time. The child follows the feelings rather than the timing, and it is out of his or her need to sort out the events occurring around him/her that the child constructs reality. We need to return to this perspective. The weight of our long grown up experience tends to cloud our judgment. I hope I succeeded in giving a voice to the child I once was, that some will listen and befriend her, I also hope this will encourage them to reconnect with their own childhood as there is much to gain in doing so.
About the Author: Claude Beccai was born in Paris, France only a few years prior to the onset of WWII. Her parents were living on the 6th floor formerly "maid quarters" of an apartment building in Paris...the city destined to soon become a pivotal location of the world wide struggle, centered in great part amidst the Western Europe theater. Her mother, Marcelle, was originally from the Normandy region of France. Her father, Antonio from Tuscany, had become a refugee in France after having fled the fascism devouring of Italy. These two otherwise loving people had an ongoing personal "war" regarding the virtues of butter versus olive oil; violence not being a part of their life...then came war. Antonio was a dreamer, a reader, an idealist prone to catching colds in the malevolent Parisian weather. Claude's mother, Marcelle, was an extremely energetic woman who had 'much better' things to do than knitting, reading or "house-wifing". A muchly redemptive feature of life in Paris was pre-war the food. Whenever possible, which was not too often, the loving family all talked amicably over raw oysters, sea urchins, or "moules marinières"...and of course, the beauty of a plethora of wonderfully delicious French desserts. There was joy, there was love, and there was 'bitter warring' (mainly about the above-mentioned olive oil and butter). Later in life, Claude Beccai became married ...to an Irish crackpot / dreamer / "poet". Then, as before; there was joy, there was love, and there was 'bitter warring' (this time revolving primarily of the superior French know-how versus the Irish knack for rhymes). Claude Beccai, having lived most of her adult life in Canada, at locations spanning shore to shore / coast to coast, now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.