Posted: 2/28/06
Woman tells of working for resistance
By Jane Palen
Managing Editor
Students at Caledonia Middle School had the opportunity last week to hear how one woman spent her years as a teenager, which was in stark contrast to what most young people experience today. Instead of attending school and having fun with her friends, Mary (Mireille Brouillard) Rostad worked for the resistance effort in World War II following the occupation of her native Belgium by the Nazis.
Rostad said it took her about 30 years to speak of her experiences in the war. Many people who experience war are reluctant to bring it up, she said.
ìThere are things that are necessary to remember,î she told the group that gathered in the auditorium ìBut itís dangerous not to remember.î
Rostad was only 15 in 1940 when Germany began bombing her hometown of Brussels, Belgium. Belgium is a small country, but a tough country, she told the students, and it was not about to allow Hitler in without a fight. His sights were on France and England, but he needed to enter Belgium to do that.
The troops that first entered the country raided homes, stores, and museums, and hunted animals with machine guns. They took cars from the local people, and made up laws on the spur of the moment. One such law was that the Belgian people could not walk on the sidewalk.
ìWhat do you do when you are 15 and someone tells you not to walk on the sidewalk?î she said. ìYou walk on the sidewalk.î
It wasnít a good idea to flout the rules, she discovered. She said she still has a dent in her forehead where she was hit with the butt of a gun.
Rostad and her friends made a sport of doing small things to frustrate the Nazis. They would take their small rations of sugar and pour them into the gas tanks of military vehicles. They would carry razor blades with them on the streetcars and cut decorative acorns off the uniforms of the soldiers. It was a competition to see who could get the most, she explained.
When she and a friend were put to work as inspectors in a factory that made flashlights for the German soldiers. they carried nail files to work and filed the switches so that they would break off after just a few uses.
At home, there was little food for her family. Her mother would trade her jewelry with local farmers for milk, butter and meat. The Germans kept close track of the assets the farmers had, and claimed most of them for themselves.
Because she was so young, Rostad did not attract a lot of attention from the Nazis. She was able to move about freely, and began working for the resistance effort, delivering messages at first, and then arms and ammunition. She used the code name ìSquirrel.î
The Belgians did not know what was really happening to their Jewish neighbors after they were ìrelocated.î To Rostad and her family, the Jews were simply friends who happened to go to another church; they didnít understand why they were being forced to leave.
Rostad decided that she wanted to join the Belgium Army in England. To get to England, Rostad would have to take a roundabout route and cross France and Spain to get to Portugal. From Portugal, she would be able to get to England. She needed to leave all her identification behind so that her family would not be harmed if she were captured. She said she was both ìsad and excitedî to leave Belgium.
Rostad began making her way cross country, sometimes sleeping in ìsafeî houses that were part of the underground, but more often sleeping where she could: barns, railroad cars, churches, and convents. Her shoes wore out, and someone gave her a pair of leather boots, the kind that in those days were used with skis.
When Rostad first arrived in France, part of the country was still free. There was a demarcation between free France and the German-occupied France.
As Rostad approached the Pyrenees mountains which are located on the border of France and Spain, she met others who had turned back. Some Spaniards were capturing people trying to cross the mountain range and selling them to the Germans for a bounty.
Rostad returned to France, which Germany eventually occupied in its entirety. She was in France during the invasion of Normandy in June of 1944.
Six month later , one of the most important battles of the war, the Battle of the Bulge, was fought in the Ardennes region on the border of Germany and Belgium. The battle was waged between December 16, 1944 and January 25, 1945. The Allied forces were successful in keeping Germany from reaching the sea. German forces never recovered from their heavy losses.
Rostad eventually began working for General Eisenhower in counter intelligence, and eventually met her husband, Allen, whom she married in 1946. She came to the U.S. as a ìwar bride,î and has lived in Houston for nearly 60 years. Rostad was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for her efforts on behalf of the resistance.
The most important thing for students to remember, said Rostad, is to never separate others into groups and refer to ìthose people.î It is that type of thinking that leads to war, she said. She closed her presentation with a quote from Martin Niemoller, and asked the students to commit it to memory:
ìThey came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didnít speak up because I wasnít a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didnít speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.î
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