Watching all of this, I feel my heart and mind split in two. One half of my heart aches for all the misery, weeps for all the destruction. But then I tell myself for the hundredth, perhaps the thousandth time, that this is the only way that we can destroy the monster. Who started all this butchery, who kindled these infernos throughout the world, who torched London, Rotterdam, Dunkirk? The monster was all-powerful, all-powerful though cowardly even then. But now his enemies are strong, and they must kill, kill, kill to live. In the struggle between barbarism and civilization killing is a necessary and unavoidable evil. Civilization has to use the weapons of barbarism in order to prevail. That is the great tragedy.
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
I wonder — a worthy subject for meditation — what Descartes would have made of industrial machinery. What a subject for a philosopher! Not just the relationship between man and machine, and all the upheavals, material, moral, and social that come in its wake, but simply the thoughts that sometimes come into your head when you are working at a machine. There’s no tricking a machine; it’s just not possible. A part out of alignment? Productivity immediately slows down. A loose screw? The whole machine seizes up. I like and admire the incorruptible integrity of a machine. With work done by hand there is always a little leeway, a margin of error, and any time lost can be made up with a little effort or improvisation; machinery, on the other hand, admits absolutely no possibility of inaccuracy or prevarication, is immune to all excuses, lies or flattery. Enduring, unswerving and fiercely tenacious, machines can teach men a marvelous lesson in integrity. The builders of the future, of our future, should take inspiration from man’s handiwork, the Blessed Machine!
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
What will become of them, those boys so full of enthusiasm and conviction? Are they fighting, or are they raging uselessly within prison walls, like me? I think back to all the happy times in my life. Just the happy times. The rest you have to forget, especially in here: you must forget, or else you get wrinkles. Wrinkles on your face are bad enough; in your heart they are even worse. Hour by hour, I relieve my unforgettable travels in the Soviet Union, my visits to Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad. I should like to tame some mice, but there aren’t any on our floor. It’s teeming with bugs, though. If it’s possible to train fleas for flea circuses, surely you must be able to tame bugs. I study flies at close quarters, admiring them as they clean their legs with such elegance. In normal circumstances we never have the time to appreciate the precise movements of a fly. In my mind I wander through the galleries in the Louvre. I try to piece together the image of some of the the paintings that I love best; but already there will be a corner, a detail, or even an entire figure that has become blurred, or even worse that has vanished entirely from memory. To tell the truth, even without books or work of any sort, it is still possible to fill one’s days.
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
‘Dear Agnès,’ he retorted with a chuckle, ‘we’re all going to end up in prison, as you well know.’
He thought the photograph of Pétain that graces my room was terribly funny.
‘It’s for the benefit of the Gestapo,’ I explain, and we giggle like idiots. It’s our very own version of the crucifixes that sixteenth-century Huguenots used to hang on their walls to put the Holy League off the scent.
Good heavens above, can a woman not carry a portable typewriter about in broad daylight without it automatically being assumed that she is the typist of an underground newspaper?
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
