Heavy water, totalitarians, and kindergarten

[mrissa]

When I was reading Scandinavia: At War With Trolls last week, I got to the raids on the heavy water plant during WWII, and I had to stop and smile, remembering how when I was 7, I figured out that heavy water probably looked like regular water. Before that when I'd picture the raids on the heavy water plant, I pictured heavy water as this rich indigo color. I would picture some of it spilling away into the ocean, mostly dispersing, but some of it collecting in the depths of the fjord or lake. I imagined that on clear days the Nazis could look down and see the tiny darker blue pools on the bottom and fume.

Then it occurred to me that most 4-to-6-year-olds may not spend time thinking about the raids on the Norwegian heavy water plant during the Second World War. Just possibly not. I had a sense that my family was weird when I was little -- of course I did. It was inevitable that I would. But the specifics of which things were weird didn't always occur to me until much later. Like, er, now.

Reading along in the same vein, I remembered my plans for what to do if a totalitarian regime took over the US. Again, this was when I was kindergarten age. I didn't intend to topple the whole regime at the age of five. My delusions of grandeur were much smaller than that. I just figured that they were likely to start persecuting some group or another -- totalitarians, from what I could piece together at the time, were like that -- and I might have to try to get its local representatives away to safety. Jewish and labor unionist families were easy, I figured, because they could blend. The totalitarian state would have to know who they were to know to mistreat them, so we could just say they were somebody else until we were all well away. As far as minorities with some impact on my life, though, Chinese immigrants were the number one group, and that would be much harder, I thought as a kindergartener, because you would have to hide the people themselves, not merely their identities. I really doubted that the totalitarians would buy, "They're not Chinese, they're Taiwanese" or some similar dodge, so we'd have to hide them, and cabbage carts were considerably less common leaving Nebraska than once they were. When I brought this up at the dinner table, Mark said, "What if they persecuted the intellectuals?" I said, "Oh, that was the easy one -- that was just my own family, maybe Jimmer on a good day."

I know why I thought all this, too. I was talking to my mom one morning about telling the truth and whether it was an absolute thing you always had to do. And being my mom, the counterexample she came up with for her preschooler was not "if someone is having a birthday surprise, you don't tell them the truth and spoil it for them" or something like that. No, Mom skipped straight on to saving Jewish people from the Nazis. She really warmed to her subject, telling the stories of the kings of Denmark and Norway during the occupation and how they declared that all loyal Danes and Norwegians would wear the Star of David when the Jewish Danes and Norwegians were commanded to do so, so that the Nazis couldn't punish the Jewish people for not doing it, and so that the Nazis couldn't tell the difference. I was fascinated. It was extremely clear to me at the time that this was a "go thou, and do likewise" situation: that should we get taken over by a totalitarian regime tomorrow, Mom would expect me to turn all my energy to thwarting them. It didn't sound like an academic question at the time.

I'm not sure whether Mom thought it was one or not. She was a big history buff, especially WWII tank battles and northern stuff, and she taught me to draw the H7 of the Norwegian resistance very nearly as soon as I knew H's and 7's. There were all sorts of things she never explicitly told me. I think if you'd asked me when I was four what the Nazis did to people when they caught them, I would have said they locked them up and then maybe guillotined them. Dad and I had read The Scarlet Pimpernel together, so I knew all about the guillotine and totalitarian states. Nobody explained what happened in the concentration camps until I was somewhat older, and I think that was a good thing; the guillotine was quite enough incentive, in my little-kid brain, to get the only Jewish girl in my school to swear that she was my cousin and take her to Canada.

North was always safety. Always. The stories Mom told were of people escaping from the continent north to Sweden (we even have a member of our extended family who was shipped north to Sweden as a 10-year-old, one of the little Austrian Jewish kids who got put in the hold of a Danish fishing boat early on). So it seemed obvious that if the US was taken over, getting people north to Canada was the goal, or at least to northern Minnesota, where they could hide in the woods and sneak north or else get on an ore boat on Superior. (Also I had been to Duluth and could easily picture it in dramatic scenes, which never hurt a plan, in my young opinion.)

Did you have childhood plans for if a totalitarian regime took over your home country? (Sadly not applicable to those of you who actually grew up under a totalitarian government -- or is it? Did you think about what you would do if someone worse or differently bad came along?) Did you plan to be the totalitarian regime? Did you not think about governments at all until high school? Did your parents talk to you about politics when you were small or leave it for later or never at all?

Comments

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Well, Mark was always cackling and planning to take over the world. So I just figured I'd be a lackey.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But a highly ranked lackey!

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Childhood is considerably farther back for me than for you, so my memories probably aren't as clear. But I definitely thought about governments in my childhood. It would have been hard not to, what with "duck and cover" and bomb shelters and such.

I don't remember my parents talking to me about politics much when I was a child, though there was a bit of it. I remember wanting them to vote for Eisenhower (which they didn't, and if I had been my adult self I wouldn't have, either). Now, as an adult, I know why: he looked grandfatherly, and in the fall of 1952 my beloved grandfather had recently died.

Coming from working-class families, my parents were big supporters of FDR; I remember them talking about him in highly laudatory ways. And my father was a strong union man; there weren't too many sins that to him were greater than crossing a picket line.

when evil USA takes over ...

[(Anonymous)]

I guess first, I was a selfish person, as what I most thought about was what book to take with me when running away from the war. Only afterward came the plans of killing enemy soldiers or gathering information about them.

Also, from that time comes my belief in evil nature of traiturous male penises. I did not know that in case of USA I could have always told that the male child in my family is of USAn parentage, not Jewish at all*

Aet

* I guess the story about German soldiers entering into the sauna and , even if the grandmother threw water on the hot stones in steaming room, the soldiers DID notice the altered penis of the Jewish boy so that all people on the farm were killed left very strong impression on my pre-teen mind.

Re: when evil USA takes over ...

[mkille.livejournal.com]

My roommate senior year of college was Slovenian. He was horrified to discover I was circumcised (through conversation!), and warned me against traveling in Bosnia or Serbia, because he thought there was a chance the Christian nationalists would pull down my pants and decide I was Muslim and kill me.

Re: when evil USA takes over ...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't know you could circumcise someone through conversation. That's a little frightening.

Re: when evil USA takes over ...

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Through conversion, yes. Through conversation, not so much, unless the conversation is the one between one's parents and the obstetrician.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

I never thought a lot about the US getting taken over. I usually skipped ahead to surviving post apocalypse.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

My childhood plans revolved around being prepared in case I slipped, fell or somehow stumbled into an alternate dimension. I made sure I always had a something useful in my pockets, and later, that I always carried my soprano recorder in my bag along with the Swiss Army Knife.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I was more of this mind too. It's why I carry a big purse full of handy things.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I miss my big bag. I always carried everything from chopsticks to a deck of cards, the current book I was reading, notebook and pen(s), Swiss Army knife and soprano recorder, to a whole mini-pharmacoepia with me. Nowdays I'm trying to travel a bit lighter, but I'm sure I'll be sorry if I do suddenly slip, fall or stumble into an alternate dimension. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I had the Swiss Army Knife thing, too. We weren't allowed to have them at school or in our school bags, which always annoyed me. Now I have my Leatherman, which is a security blanket more than anything (although it comes in handy fairly often).

It probably says something about the kind of stories you were reading that a soprano recorder qualified as "something useful"!

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It made sense to me: music hath charms... and I did read a lot of fantasy.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Bon Voyage? I think you would really like it. There is a major plot point that revolves around heavy water. (However inaccurate it may be.)

I did not have plans against a totalitarian regime, as I already lived in one ruled by my father. I did have extensive plans about running away and surviving in the wilderness.

For some reason, John Marsden's "Tomorrow When the War Began" is coming to mind. In it, some asian country takes over Australia, and these kids who are away on a camping trip become part of the resistance. I haven't read the last book in the series, and some of the middle books I don't care for, but the first few are interesting, if somewhat upsetting.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

Did you have childhood plans for if a totalitarian regime took over your home country? (Sadly not applicable to those of you who actually grew up under a totalitarian government -- or is it? Did you think about what you would do if someone worse or differently bad came along?) Did you plan to be the totalitarian regime? Did you not think about governments at all until high school? Did your parents talk to you about politics when you were small or leave it for later or never at all?

I didn't have any plans for the real world, though I made up stories about a Mary Sue of mine living in WWII (inspired by my parents' stories; they were both teenagers at the time). My parents talked politics in front of me, and we started talking about politics together when I was nine or ten-- just as B and I are doing with our kids, I realise.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, living in the shadow of Strategic Air Command tends to make one think that one's only chance in the case of nuclear war is to be off at Grandma's house when it happened. (North=safe, I'm tellin' ya.) But there were non-nuclear wars all the time.

[pameladean]

The totalitarians who might get us of my childhood were "the Russians," who might be "coming" at any moment. I regularly got them mixed up with the evil slave-hunters of the Confederacy and felt that they would be very mean to black people, and had vague notions of restarting the Underground Railway.

P.

[(Anonymous)]

As a representative of "the Russians" as a child, I can tell that the only reason why I would have been glad to die fighting Americans would have been exactly because I saw USA thorough the eyes of Bidstrup* (whose drawings were my favourites)

*some examples:
http://www.bidstrup.ru/content/0910.html
http://www.bidstrup.ru/content/0912.html

Aet

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I was all hepped up on both stories of the Resistance and reading 1984, and was also well versed in the Constitution. So I had this vague idea that I would be a resistance member shooting at bad guys in order to protect books and Freedom of Speech (come to think of it, I don't know how much has changed since then). Now I wonder if I'd be more likely to grab as many family members as I could and get either to Canada or Iceland.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I never worried much about totalitarian regimes. My state couldn't impose its will on my hometown, so I had difficulty imagining some distant federal gov't imposing its will on my state. As for invasions--not a concern. In the early 80s, I didn't know anybody who worried about being occupied, because our assumption was that at least the continental US and the USSR would be nuclear wasteheaps after any significant war.

In junior high, a recurring subject of conversation was whether the South could win a civil war the second time around. We had the military bases and the craziness, so we figured that if we got the Dakotas on our sides with their missile silos, we'd be in pretty good shape.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I really hate to tell you this, but NorDakota is Not Southern. I mean, SoDak isn't Southern, either, but NorDakota is about as Not Southern as you can get. They'd never have shared their missiles with you people, not even to get you to stop asking after their mamas' health.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

But we're so *charming*!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I thought about shucking corn and moon people, too. Just...differently.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

I have a vague recollection of thinking that if we removed all the roads into Ralston (and put up houses or parks where they'd been) perhaps the agressers would fail to notice us, or think we were someone else's responsibility, and we'd be able to hide in plain sight. Barring that the plan was to build a reeeally big wall...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of the things that always strikes me about our childhoods is that you grew up in Ralston, and I grew up in the Ralston Public School District of Omaha. It would never have occurred to me that an outsider could tell the difference between Ralston and Omaha.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

Did you have childhood plans for if a totalitarian regime took over your home country? (Sadly not applicable to those of you who actually grew up under a totalitarian government -- or is it?

Except that I had no idea I lived in one - until later, when it wasn't.

I didn't have plans for such an occasion - I did have an idea what to do in case of a war: stock up with grains (rice, buckwheat, millet, perl barley, sugar, salt, tea, and matches. and so on.

Except for the nuclear war. I felt one couldn't do anything in that case, and was terribly afraid of the nuclear wars.

I don't remember talking much about politics - until the perestroika when everything was about politics and everyone talked about it. I do remember my childhood as very happy though.

[ckd]

Though I didn't have any plans to topple the oppressors as a child, I made a point of visiting the Museum of the Danish Resistance (Frihedsmuseet) when in Copenhagen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We went to the Norwegian Resistance Museum the week before my tenth birthday. It left a mark, I think.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

North was always safety. Always.

This might be why I've always associated the ocean with fleeing for safety; growing up in North Carolina, history taught that going *south* wasn't the best idea, but *north* was a treacherous direction to go too, it being full of Yankees and all. *West* just took you on the Trail of Tears, and that would end in, well, tears. Which left east, over the Atlantic Ocean, or at least hiding out on the Outer Banks like the pirates used to do.