The Tailor - Bruno Radziminski

L-R My brother Louis, Michel, Me my brother Michael,Daniel, My mother and kneeling is my father

In the fall of 1958 our family sat around the dinner table discussing what overseas assignment my father should ask for. It was time for his foreign rotation and he could put in a request for a station. My mother and I voted for Hawaii. My brothers wanted Alaska. Remember that in 1958 neither Alaska or Hawaii was a state, so these were overseas assignments. I don’t know what Daddy actually put in for, but I suspect it was neither of the two. He got orders to report to Wiesbaden, Germany in January 1959.

While there, we went to France to visit my father’s wartime friend, Bruno Radziminski. I had some vague recollections of stories my father told us about the time he spent with the French Underground during the Big War. It all sounded romantic and somewhat sinister...but it was something that had taken place in the “olden days” some fifteen years earlier. I certainly had no interest in listening to a couple of old guys reminisce after drinking a few glasses of wine. I also recalled hearing my father’s spirited singing of Le Marseilles after similar indulgence in wine at the office parties he hosted at our house in Idaho. Fortunately for me, Bruno and his wife, Marguerite had two sons about my age. Michel was 13, Daniel was 11 and I was 10. They spoke no English and I spoke no French. Daddy was too busy drinking wine and singing with Bruno to act as interpreter, but he did give me and my brothers a French/English dictionary and sent us out to play. No worries. With that dictionary and a lot of sign language we had a great time…even went to the movies. And I developed my first serious crush. Ten year old me wanted to marry 13 year old Michel. Notice how I am snuggled up to him in the photo.

Now that I am old and my parents are no longer around to tell the stories I so much would like to hear, I wish I had paid more attention to Bruno and Daddy, instead of mooning over Michel. But all is not lost. In 2017 my family reunited with the Radziminski family and I spent a week at the home of Daniel and his wife Gwenael hearing stories about Bruno. I use Bruno as the narrator of the book, so I returned in the fall of 2019 for a much longer stay to gather even more stories from Daniel. In the tradition of our fathers, we drank a few dozen bottles of wine as well. The bonus is that Daniel is a gourmet cook and a wine connoisseur. His home is on the Atlantic coast of the Vendée region and we had fresh seafood everyday. I even gave in and ate mussels and snails…as well as a few things he refused to identify as anything other than “meat.”

A wonderful French organization:Association of Sauveteurs of Aviatorians Alliés - Association of Allied Aviator Rescuers, is working to preserve that history before it is all lost. We will never be able to capture those details the other generation could have given us, but at least the story is still there for us. It is with the help of their President Dominique Lecomte and their researcher Franck Signorile that I am able to gather the information to write Devoir de Memorie.