Last week’s article ended with New Brunswicker Janet Webster fleeing her little village of Lar Ronce, France, as the Nazis invaded. Shortly after, the French government surrendered, and she wrote a letter to her family in Shediac, describing returning to occupied La Ronce.
“Then came the return, during which we encountered, for the first time, German soldiers, German signboards, German orders," she wrote.
She wrote that the home she lived in with her husband and three young children had been pillaged by German soldiers: “Our house was in a lamentable state - mad disorder prevailed, everything had been turned upside down, broken, befouled, or pillaged.”
Communication through official channels with her parents in Shediac, the famous medical researcher and historian Dr. J. C. Webster and art expert Alice Lusk Webster, was cut off. However, Janet managed to clandestinely smuggle one last letter out of France to them.
Her tone in this last letter is aggressive and defiant, as she triumphantly wrote about the resistance:
“A thousand ingenious ways have been devised to obtain vengeance and so preserve a sense of superiority to the ponderous weight which is bearing down on us. ... An invisible wall has been erected between the people of La Roche and their visitors ... maintaining their self-respect, their resolution, and their hope. All have hope, and thanks to the friends who continue the fight, complete confidence in the outcome.”
That would be the last news Webster's parents would hear of her until December 1944, when the American Army liberated her village of La Ronce.
