BY STEVE DAMISH
Metro Editor
Love Blooms Amid Hardships of War
The drone of bombers overhead didn't scare Paulette Limousin to her, the sound was a hum of hope.
She had heard it before, and knew it was from Allied planes bound for Germany. She also knew each time they cut through the Paris skies to shorten their trip, they were shortening the war.
One of the photos of Paulette Limousin at age 18 that she sent to Amalio Giovanniello while he was at the Belgium-German front in the fall of 1944.
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Now 21, she welcomed the wail of the air raid siren.
She was a teenager when she first heard it, and would run for the shelter then, along with her family.
Not any more.
She never ran for the basement of her Gentilly apartment building in suburban Paris, like everyone else. She knew there was no need they were usually false alarms.
Besides, she hated the basement it was dark, confining, lifeless, much like Paris since the Germans had occupied the city four years earlier.
But when the sirens screamed on Aug. 26, 1944, she complied and went below. That's because a new light had illuminated the basement and her world and she was drawn to it. It was the American soldier, Amalio Giovanniello.
He was handsome, clever, with alluring eyes and a perpetual smile.
Paulette joined him in the basement, sitting next to him.
She wanted to talk with the soldier, and found a tenant in the building who spoke some English. She told the soldier this "Gio" from Brockton, USA that the air raid signal was nothing to worry about. He could relax.
Gio believed her. He took a deep breath, unfurled his war-tight face, and conceded to the moment Paulette welcomed his company.
It had been four years since she had talked with a man her age four years since she had seen such welcoming eyes, or such a radiant smile.
All the men in her life were gone, having disappeared into the darkness of the German occupation.
Some were hiding, like her teenage brother, Christian. Most were dead, like her father, Lucien, whom the Germans had worked to exhaustion in an armament factory.
All she had were her mother, Adele, and her older sister, Simone.
The women weren't soldiers they didn't understand what had happened to their world or how to fight it but they were sturdy. They were survivors.
They had been honing their survival skills ever since the German plague spread through their city.
The Limousins had little warning before the Germans penetrated the eastern wall of Paris in June 1940.
Her mother and sister would have to stay in Gentilly, with her father, whose battered body wouldn't let him travel. But Lucien Limousin ordered his sturdy daughter to take Christian and join the exodus from the city.
The decorated veteran of World War I knew what was happening he recognized the war was coming to Paris, and the specter of death would soon descend upon the city.
Paulette found what food and clothing she could carry and joined thousands of others mostly women, children and the elderly heading south, out of Paris.
Most of the refugees walked, some pushed wooden carts, a fortunate few found space on rickety trucks. Many, like Paulette, loaded up their bicycles and pedaled away from the invaders.
A day into the journey, in a line of refugees that stretched for miles, Paulette heard a sound that interrupted the ride.
She stopped the bike and Christian hopped off. Seconds later they saw it.
An Italian fighter plane.
The Axis ally dropped out of the sky, its engines deafening. In an instant, the ground erupted, people screamed, and many fell as the plane's guns carved through the line. Those who could run, like Paulette and Christian, hid in a nearby hay field.
The plane made another pass before roaring off, but the survivors had learned a lesson they would have to travel by night.
During the day, Paulette and Christian buried themselves in haystacks, ravines and culverts.
They slept, and prayed, and cried.
In the evening, they would pick at their dwindling supply of bread, sip from a stream, and mount the bike. Paulette, a pack on her back, did most of the pedaling, balancing Christian on the handle bars.
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Allied troops suffer through harsh conditions at the German-Belgian border in this World War II photo taken January 1945. The photo was given to Amalio Giovanniello by French soldiers.
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They rode for three weeks 500 miles. One morning, an exhausted Paulette dropped the bike, flung off her pack and scurried into the back room of a restaurant.
Bad news, the restaurant owner said. There was no food. No eggs. No meal.
"I didn't come here to eat," said Paulette. "I just need to rest. Can I stay and rest here? I won't eat anything."
Paulette and Christian finally reached a cousin's house in Bel Air, where she stayed for several months, until the provisional French government announced it was safe to return to Paris.
The city was still in the throes of the occupation, but Paulette was desperate to see the rest of her family, unsure whether they were even alive. She took a train back to Gentilly.
On the surface, Paris hadn't changed much under German rule. Soldiers patrolled the streets, and guards stood outside most of the government buildings, but the city seemed undisturbed.
The collaborators who ran the city with the Nazis put Paulette to work as a telephone switchboard operator. She worked long hours, mostly at night, and was careful to avoid eye contact with the Germans who walked the street.
When the armed guard outside the telephone building checked her purse before she entered, Paulette would drop her eyes, burying her chin into her shoulder.
Paulette and Simone took turns collecting food tickets at Gentilly City Hall and standing in the daily food lines. They had to wait hours for everything. A loaf of bread. A tomato. And once or twice a month, a piece of tainted beef, good only for boiling.
"The people in the country were lucky," Paulette said, "because they could have a garden or have a chicken or a goat. In the city, we couldn't have those things. We had nothing."
Once, she waited three hours in line for chocolate. A single chocolate bar but she got it. Paulette took it home and her family used a razor blade to cut slivers from the bar, which they put on pieces of bread, a couple shavings at a time.
Dinner that night was a chocolate sandwich.
As weeks became months, Paulette grew accustomed to the German occupation she had no choice.
Not her brother, Christian he wanted the Germans dead.
Christian Limousin was 14, back in his city, and bent on vengeance. One day, while he talked with other youths on the street, the Nazis cornered the group and arrested them.
They put Christian on a truck bound for a labor camp. But the German guard sitting against a machine gun on the truck nodded off, and Christian ran. The German woke up and fired, but missed.
Christian began his life of hiding he went underground.
Paulette's father wasn't as lucky.
With his body already depleted by living in the trenches of the first war, Lucien was put to work in a factory assembling German tanks. He lasted three years before both his legs were crushed by metal plates.
Lucien, his health ruined by war, died on June 26, 1944, two months before the Allies liberated his beloved Paris and two months before the arrival of the man who would captivate his youngest daughter.
When Paulette looked at Gio in the basement, she was reminded of her father. In Gio's eyes, she saw the same reassurance, the same warmth she had seen in Lucien.
As the "all clear" signal sounded outside and people began to leave the basement, she recognized another look in Gio that Lucien often had one of sadness, emptiness.
After the sirens quieted, Gio gave the French girl his brown wool Army blanket he would be pulling out the next day for Belgium.
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Amalio "Gio" Giovanniello, formerly of Brockton, is seen in his uniform in November 1944.
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Also, at her urging, Gio gave Paulette his name and the name of his unit.
The next day, Paulette started writing to Gio, using paper so thin that she had to write between the lines on the other side.
She kept her early letters simple:
Amalio, It's me, Paulette. The French girl you met in Gentilly. How are you? Are you cold? Where are you? I pray you are safe? Paris is quiet.
She wrote while handling the telephone switchboard downtown. She wrote before work, after work, before bed, and when she awoke in the middle of the night.
Paulette wrote almost every day to the man she barely knew but couldn't forget to the soldier who had brought light to her darkened city.
Like Paris, she was coming back to life.
In Belgium, Gio was learning how to dodge death.
He was in a foxhole, in the woods of Belgium, when a corpsman delivered the first batch of six letters.
"Those can't be for me," Gio said. "I haven't written to anybody in some time."
"They all have your name on it," the corpsman said, "and it's even spelled right. It has to be you."
Gio saw the letters were from the French girl. But why? He hadn't touched her had barely said a word to her.
He scanned the letters they were written in French, on paper barely stout enough for a sneeze.
What the hell do they say? What does she want?
The Cajun would know, Gio thought. He grabbed his rifle and scuttled past a few foxholes to find the French-speaker from Louisiana.
The Cajun read them all there wasn't much there, he told Gio. The French girl was making small talk, that's all.
But a few days later, six more letters came.
Then seven.
Then four.
They arrived every week a stack of letters from the French girl.
Gio hadn't expected one by the end of the war, he had 400.
He responded to a couple of the letters to be courteous.
But one day the Cajun interpreter noticed something different as he rested in a foxhole with Gio and read the latest batch.
"These aren't like the others," he said, grinning. "She's getting serious on you. If I'm reading these right, I'd say this French girl is falling in love with you."
The differences, his friend said, started with the salutations. Once, the French girl had begun the letters by simply writing, "Amalio."
Not anymore. Now it was, "Mon amour" "My love."
Gio was bewildered.
Mon amour? How did this happen? Who is this girl?
A familiar sound ripped the air overhead. Gio curled his body around the letters and pressed into the foxhole, trying to become as small as possible.
German artillery incoming.
Metro Editor Steve Damish can be reached at sdamish@enterprisenews.com.
Copyright 2005 The Enterprise
