Begging for water in Bruges
After my parents passed away, I visited their attic, in haste. The pandemic was raging, travel was almost impossible. I stayed for forty-eight hours at a time, to avoid a lengthy quarantine, and made three trips. Amongst a hoard of paperwork, there was a heavy leather book. No time to read the title, it wasn’t easy in a dim attic. I decided to keep it and quickly stuffed it in my suitcase. I could have chosen otherwise. Such visits were a succession of short fraught moments about new memories in the making. It took another year to find time to open it.
Amongst its chapters there was one by my grandfather, written just after the war. I never knew, was never told that he had been working in the old town of Bruges during the German invasion of Belgium, as people fled towards the coast. Here I translate a few of his phrases about Bruges in April 1940 and I add a few of his words in Flemish:
“The slaughter of defenceless people (afslachting van weerloze mensen), the agitated crowd whom — along passable and impassable roads — literally walked itself to death towards the coast, laborious and sluggish, a sad procession of flounderers on foot, many had thrown away their painful footwear and stumbled onwards on socks or on swollen, bloody feet bound in bandages, onwards towards the old town of Bruges, that absorbed more and more refugees, until there was no more food, places to stay or even a space to lie or stand, heaps of the wounded, half senseless because of fear (half zinnelozen van de schrik), together with 8 other doctors in Bruges I…”.
He goes on to talk about his life afterwards: “still I hear the sirens howling, still I see generic desperation in hollow weary eyes (de algemene radeloosheid in holle vermoeide ogen), and the endless series of stretchers with the wounded: pale, bled-out faces, still I hear — monotonous and suppliant — those cries: water! de l’eau! I carried in my clothes the dreadful odour of gangrene. And may they not speak, these people with their foul bandages?” I am glad I found that book, that chapter, some of his words.
