1945: Arthur's Bicycles

French bicycle troops making their way to the front, 1939 
Source: The Atlantic

    I've been working through about 50 pages of correspondence that are to, by, or about my grandfather.  The letters had been in his commanding officer's files, but are now located in the Drôme Department archives in France. These letters are a lot of fun to read; it's like a peek into their lives in the immediate aftermath of WW2.  

    Anyway, I discovered a bicycle in one of the letters:  

P.S.: When will you come and get the bicycle that ROUX abandoned? If we delay, someone might steal it one day.

--Arthur Lubinski to Louis Robin, 9 February 1945

    Louis Robin was a local butcher who served in the same maquis unit as my grandfather, and after demobilizing, Mr. Robin helped to coordinate some of the efforts of the maquis food cooperatives. It makes sense - as a butcher, he had easier access to food and distribution channels.  He also served in the same section of the same Maquis company as my grandfather, an "SHR" group that supported all the different platoons and groups within the unit.  Léon Roux was a school teacher who seemed to know everyone in the area and had been an officer in the same Maquis unit, someone else my grandfather would have known well.

    Grandpa Arthur must have reached out to Mr. Roux about the bike, because I found another mention in letter dated a few weeks later:

     As agreed, I sent the bicycle to Mr. DRAGON last Monday.

--Léon Roux to Arthur Lubinski, 21 March 1945

    I certainly don't know for sure that it's the same bicycle, but from context, it seems like might be: Léon Roux left a bike behind, and Grandpa started writing people to find out where it needed to be, and finally managed to get the issue resolved.

    It's been 80 years since these letters were written, and I doubt the bike still exists, but I can hope, right? If you are interested, here is a series of wonderful photos of the bicycles used during WW2. Did you know both sides had bicycle machine-gun troops? And that they had bicycle ambulances, and tandem bikes that accommodated up to five people?

    Bicycles played an important part throughout my grandfather's story - he didn't own a car until sometime after he moved to the US in 1947 though he learned to drive while he was still in Europe (the government of France provided him with a car to use while he worked on the reconstruction). But after the invasion of Belgium in 1940, enough infrastructure had been damaged in the attack that public transportation wasn't an option for a while, so he rode his bike 40 km to work (about 2 hours each direction).  

    I don't know for sure what happened to that bike - but I thought perhaps he might have given it to his brother Paul when my grandparents escaped to France.  About a year later, Paul got himself from Belgium to Scotland via Switzerland, France, Spain and Gibraltar, but I mostly don't know how he did it.  Since he too was escaping, I thought maybe he pedaled the backroads at night on his brother's bike, and so I was thrilled when I came across this photo at the article linked above:

Soldiers walk their bikes along a partly frozen lake
on an alpine pass in Switzerland in 1943.
Source: The Atlantic

    It proves that my guesswork regarding how Uncle Paul got himself across Europe wasn't completely implausible. It took him about 18 months to work his way from Belgium to the UK, but about half of it was spent in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp in Spain.  Even excluding his incarceration, it took a long time, so I think he couldn't have just taken a train, because then the trip would have been measured in days, not months.  So, I think he must have made the journey on foot, on his bike, with the help of underground networks, or some combination of all three (which is how I depicted it in Paul's book).

    After Grandpa escaped to and settled in rural France, he got a job as a farmhand to ensure his family stayed fed. I wrote — and this next bit is completely made up — that he borrowed a bicycle from his landlord so that he could get around the neighborhood more easily.  After they immigrated to the US, Grandpa was forced to buy a car, but I think he must have been nostalgic for his time pedaling around Belgium, because at some point he acquired another bicycle. I recall seeing it in his garage in Tulsa, although I never actually saw him ride it.  

    Interestingly, my grandmother never learned how to ride, and one of my aunts either didn't learn, or had difficulty learning. I too had trouble mastering the bicycle, which makes me wonder if there was a genetic component - but I had a gross motor development delay that meant I was poor at alternating movements (pedaling a bike, or the crawl stroke in swimming) but good at mirror-image movements (breast stroke or jumping jacks). I outgrew it by eight or nine, when I finally learned to ride a bike.