Marcel Pinte—6 Year Old War Victim and Hero

I have mixed feelings about the story of Marcel Pinte. I didn’t think that any child, especially a child as young as six, should ever be used in a war situation. However, I have also never lived in a wartime situation.

Marcel was born on 12 April 1938 in Valenciennes, France. He was the youngest of five children. His father, Eugene Pinte, was a local resistance leader who used his farmhouse in Aixe-sur-Vienne to receive coded messages from London and coordinate parachute drops in a field nearby.

Young Marcel acted as a courier for local resistance fighters. He was given the nickname “Quinquin” after a children’s song.

Marcel surprised people with his “astonishing” memory and was trusted to deliver messages to Resistance chiefs, which he hid under his shirt. “He understood everything at once,” Marc Pinte, grandson of Marcel’s father Eugène, told the AFP news agency.

He said Marcel was happy to spend time in the woods with Resistance fighters, known as maquisards, learning about their clandestine methods.

Eugène, his wife Paule and their five children hosted clandestine farmhouse meetings with Resistance fighters and even hid a British paratrooper in the loft, so it was a hive of activity at night.

Another relative, Alexandre Brémaud, spent years researching Marcel’s story because the official records focused on the Resistance fighters and sabotage operations, rather than on the many helpers – often women and children – who also took risks to defeat the Nazi occupation.

Mr Brémaud told the BBC: “My grandmother described him as an extremely happy, intelligent and brilliant brother, sparkling with mischief”.

Also, he made for a very able messenger. The Nazis didn’t question Marcel, who, because of his young age, avoided serious scrutiny. “With his school satchel on his back he didn’t raise suspicions,” said his relative. However, Marcel’s youth could be a concern too.

“There was a bit of carefree attitude because of his age,” the French newspaper Le Figaro quoted a relative as saying. (and why wouldn’t there be he was only 6)“A resident told his father to be careful because Marcel sometimes sang songs learned from fighters.”

On the night of 19 August 1944 Marcel went with a group of maquisards, resistance fighters, to a parachute drop of munitions and other supplies. They had received a coded message via the BBC: “The forget-me-not is my favourite flower.” They waiting to meet other guerillas arriving by parachute ahead of a battle. But when they landed, a Sten submachine gun accidentally went off. To the horror of everyone there, the spray of bullets struck and killed six-year-old Marcel Pinte.

Marcel was buried by local resistance fighters on 21 August shortly before the liberation of Limoges, in which his father participated. According to Marc Pinte, the next supply drop, a few days after Marcel’s death, used black parachutes: “The British knew that the little Marcel played a real role. This parachute was the calling card sent to the family.

In 1950, Marcel was posthumously awarded the rank of sergeant of the resistance. In 2013, he posthumously received an official card for “volunteer combatants of the resistance” from the National Office of Former Combatants and War Victims.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54919375

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/france-pays-tribute-to-six-year-old-resistance-hero-marcel-pinte

https://allthatsinteresting.com/resistance-fighters/8

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The Children of WWII- Part 2

“A child is born with no state of mind,blind to the ways of mankind”

During WWII,as in any other war, all the children were victims,without exception.Of course the degree and severity on how they were victims had a significant difference. Some lost their lives,while others lost their innocence. Many of those who lost their innocence had to live with the emotional scars for the rest of their lives, for they had been forced to do things no child should ever have to do.

The only ‘crime they committed was being born at the wrong time,in the wrong place and sometimes to the wrong parents.

Below are pictures of some the Children of WWII, some of these images may be distressing but I feel it is important to show them.

These children are eating carrots on sticks, instead of ice

Children from east London hold up pieces of anti-aircraft shell fragments they have collected

A young child leaning next to her dead Mother in a camp for civilians somewhere in the Soviet Union.

Adolescent German prisoners of war – almost children – in an American prison camp shortly after the end of World War II.

Children being evacuated by train out of Berlin, Germany.

Two young brothers, seated for a family photograph in the Kovno ghetto. One month later, they were deported to the Majdanek camp.

A photograph of orphaned children within the Lodz ghetto

Lodz, Poland, 1941, Nachman Zonabend distributing sweets to children at Hanukkah

Ravensbrück, Germany

Family members say goodbye to a child through a fence at the ghetto’s central prison where children, the sick, and the elderly were held before deportation .

Children practising first aid, with dolls. They are playing in a bomb-damaged house during the Blitz

The child soldiers

Jewish babies

Nursery school children at play wearing their gas masks.

The Children of WWII

“A child is born with no state of mind,blind to the ways of mankind” I would never have imagined I would  use the words of a 1980’s hip hop song in a blog relating to WWII. The words are from the 1982 Hip Hop hit “the Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But the words are so true. When a child is born his or her brain  is like a blank canvas, and is shaped and filled by the influence of the adults that surround them.

During WWII,as in any other war, all the children were victims,without exception.Of course the degree and severity on how they were victims had a significant difference. Some lost their lives,while others lost their innocence. Many of those who lost their innocence had to live with the emotional scars for the rest of their lives, for they had been forced to do things no child should ever have to do.

The only ‘crime they committed was being born at the wrong time,in the wrong place and sometimes to the wrong parents.

Below are pictures of some the Children of WWII, some of these images may be distressing but I feel it is important to show them.

The Child soldier.

20 March 1945: Adolf Hitler decorates his last tranche of boy soldiers for fighting to the bitter end. Artur Axmann, leader of Hitler Youth, is behind Hitler; Otto Günsche is in background on left, then Hermann Fegelein in the center and Heinz Linge on the right.

U.S. Marine 1st Lt. Hart H. Spiegal tries to communicate with two Japanese child soldiers captured during the Battle of Okinawa. June 17, 1945.

A sixteen-year old German anti aircraft soldier of the Hitler Youth, Hans-Georg Henke, taken prisoner in the state of Hessen, Germany. He was a member of the Luftwaffe anti-air squad who burst into tears as his world crumbled around him. His father died in 1938 but when his mother died in 1944 leaving the family destitute, Hans-Georg had to find work in order to support the family. At 15 years of age he joined the Luftwaffe.

The displaced and evacuated children, they were also victims. Their uncomplicated lives suddenly became a turmoil they had in one way or another deal with. They suddenly had to grow up. Some would even find themselves in a different country or even continent.

circa 1943: Young boys swinging from a lamp post in the midst of rubble left by a city bombing raid. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

As the Red Army took control of East Prussia at the end of World War II, thousands of orphaned children were forced to flee the cities and enter the woods in search of food and shelter. They became known as wolf children because they traveled in packs and made regular night trips between Germany, Poland, and Lithuania to avoid Soviet detection.

During the Second World War New Zealand invited 800 Poles – 734 of them orphaned children – to take refuge in New Zealand for the duration of the war. They had made a harrowing journey from Poland through Russia and Iran, to reach New Zealand on 31 October 1944.

The Children of the Holocaust.

Child survivors dressed in clothes made from German uniforms. The children in the photo are wearing clothes made for them by the Americans out of German uniforms. As prisoners in the camp, they wore striped uniforms just like the other prisoners.

The photo below shows Josef Schleifstein, posing in his camp uniform, a year after he was liberated.

The children that often are disregarded as being war victims are the children of Nazi officials who were killed by their parents at the end of the war for fear of what the allies would do to them. I believe these children were victims too, for they didn’t ask for any pf this.

The Goebbels children.

Deputy Mayor Dr. jur. Ernst Kurt Lisso of Leipzig, his wife Renate Stephanie, in chair, and their daughter Regina Lisso after committing suicide by cyanide in the Leipzig New Town Hall to avoid capture by US troops. April 18, 1945.