How did the Great War (WWI) affect you?
I was born at the end of the war. Within five months of my birth, the Allied Forces had an armistice with Germany. My mother died in childbirth -- she was a tiny little thing who was generally in poor health anyway, so the labor was just too much for her. She was alive just long enough to name me. My father, however, did fight in the war. He was part of the Chemin de Dames. It was terrible. Over 100,000 French troops died, including my father's closest friend. He was called home after my mother's death in order to take care of me, but my father was not the same. He suffered severely from depression and something else that I do not know the name of. He would have terrible nightmares, I could hear him from my impromptu bed in the living room. In them he was shouting words that didn't make sense and sometimes he would cry. My father couldn't keep a steady job and had trouble finding work. We were quite poor as a result. My father took up drinking instead. He didn't harm me when he was drunk; rather he was always very sad. I usually had to make my own supper. However, I loved my father. He was the only family I had known since birth and we did have a close relationship, even when he was sick. It wasn't until it started getting very bad that we drifted, he not able to have a functional relationship with anybody, and I was just sad to see him that way.

One day, when I was fourteen, I had received highest marks on a math test. I ran home from school in a whirl, excited to tell my father about my great achievement. The second floor apartment was quiet, so I thought my father might be sleeping. He was not in his bed. I went into the kitchen and that is when I saw him: he was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, a gun only inches from his hand. The neighbors weren't home, so I sat in the kitchen with my dead father for a few hours until they arrived. I told them what happened and they phoned the police, telling me I was a silly girl for not doing so myself. And so I became an orphan.

I have one aunt living in Florence. I had never met her and she had no desire to change this. I was put in a Catholic orphanage on the other side of Paris.

That is the short version. I won't go into all the sordid details of how I ran away or any of that. But the war took my father and it took my childhood, even though I didn't live through it. I'm afraid that's what this war will do to my children, if I ever have any, and to children everywhere. It's such a sad, terrible thing, war. But I'm afraid the world deems it necessary.