A Spy, An Interpreter, and A Model: One Classy "Soldier"

While exploring various wars in class, we learned about each conflict's immediate causes, the goal/rationale, and then we primarily discussed its outcomes in terms of the United States.It makes sense that we'd focus on the war's effects mostly on America because we're American and since we're in American Studies, but I wonder how did these wars effect other nations, those directly involved, and those indirectly involved? I thought it would be interesting to share a very unique account of World War II as seen through the eyes of my grandmother, Lysiane Wagner Sutherland. 

Lysiane was in her twenties when her home city of Brussels, Belgium was taken over by the Nazi Germans. She lived alone with her mother, a baroness, in a castle. Their estate was invaded by a German pilot and his family. My grandmother and her mother, keep in mind they're Belgium royalty, were ordered to cook and clean for the Germans, powerless in the confinements of their own home. Being the determined and unbelievably strong willed woman that she was, Lysiane decided she would use her unfortunate situation as fuel to forge her way in combatting the war against the denial of the Four Freedoms. She became a spy for America, trading secrets and undisclosed information to General Eisenhower. Since she was fluent in seven languages, she also worked as an interpreter. In compensation for her espionage work, Lysiane was decorated by General Eisenhower and flown to the United States on his private plane. 

A pretty amazing story, huh? I cannot deny that I have and always will consider my grandma's story heroic. Even so, On the Rainy River, the short story we read by Tim O'Brein makes me look at her narrative through a different lens. While O'Brein did (courageously?) fight for his country in the Vietnam War, he considered himself a coward for he went for the wrong reasons. While my grandma had no resistance to her public service, think about all of those she betrayed and hurt in disclosing information to the Americans. Any conversation she had-whether with family, friends, or acquaintances-was taken as evidence for German exile, as a warrant for defending the Four Freedoms. Inevitably, through disciplining traitors, innocent lives were lost. They lives were involuntarily sacrificed for the greater good of not not simply Belgium, of not solely America, but of the entire world.  This adds even more questions to our class conversation of how to justify the worth of a single life. Can and should one life be sacrificed for the protection of a thousand lives? 

With something as abstract as war, I don't think answers can ever be fully determined to a question like "is war ever justified?" However, their answers are ever changing, ever evolving from conflict to conflict, from person to person. I do know that I count myself extremely lucky to have such an interesting slice of history in my ancestral descent. 

P.S. While this doesn't have much to do with our unit on war, I thought some might be interested to know that after coming to America, my grandmother became a Christian Dior model and married my grandfather, who was the voice of Thumper in Bambi.