Vermont's Northland Journal - The 60th Anniversary of the End of World War II

The 60th Anniversary of the End of World War II in Europe
A Newport Woman Looks Back

by Scott Wheeler

Ken and Jackie Powers met on the battlefront in France.
It was a love that has lasted more than 60 years.
This picture of the couple was taken shortly after they met in France in 1944.

The rhythmic pounding of heavy soled German military boots sounded as soldiers ran down the darkened streets of a French village in search of human quarry. Dragged from their homes and lined up, some of the villagers begged for their lives. Others stood defiant against an enemy they had long ago learned to hate. Few were guilty of anything other than living in a country ripped apart by war, instigated by a man who wanted to rule the world.
The soldiers stood, rifles ready. Were they bluffing as they sometimes did as part of a sick mind game to control the people and keep them living in constant fear? A volley of gunshots rang out. Bullets tore through flesh and bone, and bodies crumpled to the ground. Pools of blood began to form. The soldiers weren’t bluffing – this time.
On Sunday, May 8, 2005, the world celebrated the 60th anniversary of the end of Adolph Hitler’s reign of terror in Europe, terror that threatened to encompass the world, terror that sent about millions of people who Hitler deemed “undesirables”, many of them of Jewish origin, to the gas chambers. For Jackie Powers of Newport, the memories of that war are still etched in her mind, an ever-painful reminder of her youth in Nazi occupied France.
“They were mean, even the women,” Powers said in a thick French accent, referring to the German soldiers. “We were dirt; we were nothing,” she added. “There isn’t a thing they didn’t do. They pushed you like a dog. You no good. We suffered. They put us through Hell. It would take me a month to tell what they done.” She said some of her memories sound so farfetched that some people have a difficult time believing that she is telling the truth.
“You’ve got to be there,” Powers said. “You’ve got to see it with your own eyes.”
Powers was blunt about her utter disappointment in the French government’s refusal to support the U.S. in it war against Iraq. “When the United States come to France in World War II, we happy, we free,” she said. There is little doubt in her mind that if it wasn’t for the U.S. coming to the rescue of France and the rest of Europe during World War II, that she’d most likely be dead today. She found great irony in the fact that now when the U.S. turns to the government of France for help, that country’s government turned its back.
“Bush did a good job,” Powers said. “Because of President Bush, the people of Iraq can now be free.” She also said she wonders how many of the people she sees protesting the war know what it is like to live under a dictator and not know when you’re going to die at the hands of a mad man. Powers also wonders whether the protesters care about all the people forced to suffer under Saddam Hussein the same way she suffered under Adolph Hitler.
Raised in Ville de Gennevilliers, a community about fifty miles from Paris, Powers said she still has nightmares of the horrors of her youth more than sixty years ago. Sharing her story proved an emotional roller coaster for the Newport woman. Emotions welled up while talking about the atrocities perpetrated on she and her people.
Powers was only eight months old when tragedy came knocking for the first time. Her mother died, leaving her father to care for her, which he could not, given his lifestyle as a solder in the French Foreign Legion. Instead, Powers was raised by her grandmother.
The happiness of the people of France began to unravel when, on September 1, 1939, Hitler ordered his troops to invade neighboring Poland. German troops invaded France in May 1940.
“They bombed night and day,” she said, remembering the days that war came. Whenever the air raid warnings sounded, which was often, Powers and the other people of France were forced to flee for cover, often to the cellars of their homes, homes that were sometimes leveled during air raids. “You run, you scared, you don’t know if somebody was going to kill you,” Powers said.
Paris fell to the Germans on June 14, 1940 – France was officially occupied by Germany, one of many countries to fall to Hitler’s regime. Life for Powers and most of her countrymen would never be the same again. With her father away battling the Germans, Powers, now a teenager, lived sometimes on her own, and sometimes with her grandmother. To earn money to feed herself, Powers cleaned the houses of people who still had money for such luxuries.
Many people perished in the initial blitz on the country and many more died during the years of German occupation. Destruction, heartache, and despair became a daily ritual of life.

Millions of people perished in concentration camps
throughout Europe during World War II.

The German soldiers killed many people, she said. They didn’t care if the people they killed were soldiers or civilians. Sometimes angered for some unknown reason, or sometimes for no reason at all, German troops, without warning, rounded up a group of villagers, lined them up and shot them. Choking back tears, Powers told about one of the most painful sights that she witnessed during the occupation – a young boy bayoneted to a church door by a German soldier.
Under German rule, everything was scarce, Powers said. Food, clothes, and most other goods were subject to strict rationing. Everybody was given coupons to buy a meager amount of goods. But their ration of food wasn’t nearly enough to stave off the hunger and the ration of clothing wasn’t enough to clothe them. This caused many people in France to resort to desperate measures to stay alive. Powers told of arriving at the market hours before it opened, in the dark of night, to jockey for a position in line with many other people hoping to obtain their rations.
“You hoped and prayed you were one of the first ones,” she said. “I was hungry. I was young at the time. I was starving. So, I had a ticket for a month, sometimes I’d eat it in two or three days.”
Being fussy wasn’t an option if you wanted to stay alive. She told of the excitement of finding a piece of moldy bread in a drawer. “There was a piece of bread, all green,” she said. “I didn’t care if it was black or green. When you’re hungry, you eat. I tell you, that bread didn’t last long. I had good teeth back then.”
Clothing was as scarce as food. I had some shoes, but I didn’t have soles,” Powers said. To make her shoes more bearable, she stuffed pieces of cardboard inside the shoes to serve as cushioning.
There was little happiness in France under German occupation, Powers said. The Germans had many rules, rules that they strictly enforced. One of those rules was the nighttime blackouts. To prevent Allied aircraft from pinpointing the cities at night, lights were out at 9 p.m., or else. The “or else” is what terrified Powers and her fellow Frenchmen. The echoes of the boots of the German Special Forces, including that of the elite storm trooper and the Gastpo. The soldiers wore high black boots that made a distinctive pounding sound when they hit the ground, Powers recalled.
Disobey the “lights out order” and you would likely live to regret it. They’d go to an offender’s house and “Boom, they shot your lights,” she said. That is, if you were lucky. The unlucky ones took the bullet, not the light.
Life for the French under German rule was horrible, Powers said, but not nearly as bad as it was for the Jewish people who lived in France and other German occupied European countries. “They abused those people. They were mean to the Jews. They were scared of the Germans. We were too.”
To identify the Jewish people more easily, the German soldiers forced them to wear a yellow star – signifying the Star of David, a symbol of Judaism. Realizing their lives were in danger, some Jewish people fled the country into the dark of night. Others were taken off of the street or from their homes and locked up in concentration camps. Many perished in the camps, their bodies often fed into huge furnaces.
Powers’ father almost lost his life in a German camp. Captured by German soldiers, he was tortured. He knew the likelihood of survival was slim, so he hatched an escape plan. Concealing himself in the undercarriage of a fright train, he escaped the camp and began his journey home. When he showed up at the door of the family’s home, his daughter was stunned. The family rejoiced at this surprise reunion. That rejoicing was short-lived when German soldiers knocked at the family’s door in search of Powers’ father. Decades later, she can still visualize the soldiers at the door in their German military uniforms, as her father hid. But it was the soldiers’ ultimatum that rings in her ears until this day.

The Powers were married on August 1, 1945 – Susan Jumenter (left), the Maid of Honor,
and Joe Fontaine (Right), the best man, along with the happy newlyweds.

Powers stood holding her grandmother’s hand and heard the soldiers threaten: “If he don’t show up in 24 hours, this one come with us,” said one, pointing at Powers.
“He meant me,” she emphasized.
But I would not have turned in my dad,” Powers said, staunchly, knowing that handing over her father would have meant certain death for him. “I wouldn’t care if they shot me.”
Realizing it wasn’t an idle threat, the family fled into the woods, leaving behind their possessions. All they brought with them was four bags of sugar, practically the only food they owned. The sugar wasn’t enough to keep away the pangs of hunger, but it provided them with quick energy. Several days later, with the German war machine facing imminent collapse, the family dared venture back home, speculating that the Germans were too busy fighting the approaching Allied forces, including American troops, to chase a fugitive prisoner.
Arriving home, they found that the German soldiers had kept their promise to return. Soldiers had ransacked the house, sending a warning to the family that if they returned home, they, too, would face destruction. The soldiers ruined furniture and pictures, and they sliced bed mattresses with bayonets, Powers said. Realizing their lives were still at risk, yet with no other place to go, they hid at home. Fortunately for Powers and her family, the German soldiers never returned.
Throughout the war, German news accounts continually boasted of German victories over Allied forces. Even late in the summer of 1944, these propaganda stations were still reporting of German victories when it became increasingly obvious that the tide was turning against Germany. Powers and the other villagers were seeing more Allied aircraft flying overhead. There was little doubt that the German regime was crumbling. If only Powers and her family could live long enough to enjoy their approaching freedom.
Bombs again began to rain down on Ville de Gennevilliers. Unlike during the German invasion in 1940, these were Allied bombs – meant to destroy German fortifications and soften German resistance for the Allied soldiers already on the ground. Powers can still feel the excitement of the day in the late summer of 1944 that American tanks and trucks rolled into her town, liberating them from German control.
“When the Americans came in everybody hugged and kissed them, you could feel Americans were good people. Americans are good people, strong people. They have a heart.” She was instantly smitten by a young American soldier from Newport, Vermont. The young soldier’s name was Ken Powers, a member of the Army’s 112th Division – the man whom Jackie later married.
“He was good looking,” Jackie said in the tone of an infatuated schoolgirl, recalling the day she met the young soldier. “He had black, curly hair. He was sharp.”
Dating for the couple proved a difficult task. The still raging war was only part of the problem. Ken spoke only English, and Jackie spoke only French. Ken’s friend and fellow soldier, Joe Fontaine, formerly of Charleston, could speak both French and English. He accompanied the young couple on dates to translate for them. “He told Joe what to tell me, and I told Joe what to tell him,” Jackie laughed. Ken and Jackie also relied on improvised sign language and a small French-English dictionary. Eventually, they learned to speak one another’s language.
Whereas most young men woo their dates with chocolates and flowers, Ken romanced Jackie with better gifts – food. With the war in Europe still on, food was still scarce and Jackie found herself continually hungry. To ease her hunger, Ken tried to get Jackie whatever he could. Often all he could get was bread and peanut butter.
The couple married at 5 p.m. on August 1, 1945. By 9 p.m. that same evening, Ken was on his way for reassignment in Germany leaving behind his new wife. About six months passed before they laid eyes on each other again.

The Powers have been through a lot over the years, but they say they
love each other as much as the day they met more than six decades ago.

To surprise her husband, Jackie boarded a train and set out for Germany. Cramped conditions and a lack of seats forced her to sleep on the floor. Unable to travel for a honeymoon, they rented a hotel room near where Ken was stationed. Much to their surprise, they opened the door to their room only to find another couple in the room. Once the confusion was resolved, the Powers enjoyed a short honeymoon. Soon after the couple were headed to Vermont.
“People are so good in this country,” she said. Not once has she ever regretted her decision to leave the country of her birth. But partially because of the move, she lost contact with her father for thirty-five years. “I lost him, she said, still pained by that fact. “It was an awful feeling.” However, after years of investigative work, she was reunited with her father in France.

Through good times and bad, the relationship of this French girl and this American boy, who met in war, has stood the test of time. Jackie said she still loves her husband as much as she did when they met – in the days when the handsome young soldier used to slip that scared young girl those pieces of peanut butter and bread.
Turning to her husband, she affectionately reminded him that he is as handsome as the day she met him, although his hair isn’t as black or curly as it once was. “I wouldn’t trade him for nothing in the world,” she said.