~ Idea 3301 - 3400 Section INTRODUCTION ~
A Boy's Letter to a Prime Minister
Never fail to denounce an injustice to the person at the top.
Someone wrote to me: "Dear Mr. Muller, I love your book of 2000 Ideas
but what can I do? I am a nobody, having a very low, minor job in a big
firm. You were lucky to have a great life in high positions allowing
you to know the whole world. You are still a big shot even if it is
only for one dollar a year. I cannot do anything and am very
frustrated, unhappy with my life. To read you made me even unhappier
and frustrated."
I wrote him back: "Well, I have my frustrations too, e.g. that so few of
my books are being read and so few of my ideas implemented. I am 77
years old and I could easily give up. But when that thought occurs to
me, I remember a story from my youth which lifts me up again and
prevents me from giving up. It is a letter which I wrote when I was a
refugee at the age of sixteen, with my father being mobilized in the
French Army, my mother without barely any resources and my studies and
normal life interrupted. Here it is:
September 1939. I was sitting in my room, reading romantic literature,
my soul filled with happiness and poetry about the beauty of the world.
From my window I glanced over the Saar River into Germany. During the
last few years the woods had disappeared from the hills on the German
side and had been replaced by wheat fields and a new village — Adolf
Hitler Dorf. Its inhabitants were metallurgical workers who also did
some farming and small animal husbandry in order to increase the
self-sufficiency of the German Reich. Along the river and its
tributary, the Blies, humans once again were divided by hatred. There
were constant incidents. The Germans organized innumerable noisy
parades along the river, appealing to the beastly side of human nature.
On the French side, we did not remain passive either: we sang the
"Marseillaise" at the opening of each soccer game in the stadium which
was located right along the border. The Nazis retaliated by holding
political meetings opposite the stadium at the exact time of the opening
of the games in order to drown the sounds of the French national anthem
under their Teutonic marches. Hatred was escalating again along a
peaceful river and under the same sun, arousing the emotions of the
people like a vicious tide. Noise, colors, words, music, uniforms,
sport, day and night, the living and the dead, everything was mobilized
to bolster the "greatness" of each nation.
But this was for me the beautiful age of sixteen, when to be alive and
to approach adulthood and love were tantamount to paradise. The
writings of Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Goethe and Schiller transported me
to heaven. The preceding year our town had been evacuated a first
time. We had fled to the French Jura mountains, to the summer house of
former tenants who had moved away from the border when they saw the turn
of events. Our place of refuge was not far from the region where
Lamartine had lived. I had walked in his woods, reading his poetry with
ecstasy, considering him the greatest literary genius the earth had
ever borne.
I was sharing my thoughts and feelings with my beloved authors when my mother climbed the staircase, entered my room and said:
"Boy, come down and help us pack. War is going to break out any
moment. Our town is again being evacuated. Our car has already been
requisitioned, but the driver can take us to our place of refuge with a
load of clothes and food if we can leave early enough. Every minute
counts. Get ready and pack your things.
I answered:
"I could not care less about that war. I hate all wars. Why should
anyone, especially a madman like Hitler, have the right to interrupt the
course of my life and of my studies?"
My mother looked at me sternly. Her blue eyes turned into cold steel
and became filled with a world of hard messages and thoughts. Then,
without a comment, she slapped me in the face with a strength that
almost knocked me senseless.
She left the room without a word. I had gotten her message; I packed my
clothes and went downstairs to help with the preparations of the rest
of the family.
Many years later, when addressing a group of veterans visiting the
United Nations in New York, a French officer, upon hearing that I came
from the town of Sarreguemines, had this comment:
"You must have left your town hurriedly, for when we entered it, we
still found dishes with food and unfinished meals on the tables." This
comment, indeed, describes better than anything else what our evacuation
was like.
In the afternoon the driver who had taken possession of our car drove us
to Lutzelbourg, a little locality forty miles away from the border,
where my mother had rented in anticipation of these events a small
apartment usually only occupied during the summer by vacationers. Days
ago my father had been mobilized into the French army and had left for a
destination unknown to us in a vast underground fortress called the
Maginot Line.
After leaving us at our place of refuge, the driver with our car returned to Sarreguemines and we never saw them again.
The following day, war was declared, annihilating my lofty, romantic
dreams and placing me at the age of sixteen at the helm of the family.
My mother tried to live on her meagre savings, which were rapidly
dwindling under the effects of inflation. The rent for our apartment
was high and the priest who owned it wanted us to get rid of our dog.
So we moved to a cheaper abode, an attic in a farmhouse of a hamlet
called Trois-Maisons (Three Houses). It was a tiny and poor hamlet
indeed, located on a desolate plateau near Phalsbourg, above
Lutzelbourg, swept by cold and rainy winds, a region deeply marked by
wars and desolation. We could walk both to Lutzelbourg and to
Phalsbourg, two places for which my heart soon developed a deep
affection:
Lutzelbourg for its red sandstones, its hills and little valleys densely
covered with pine trees, its crystal-clear river, and also a young
Parisian girl who was staying at one of the patrician houses and whom I
loved madly, without ever daring to address a single word to her;
Phalsbourg for its history, its fortifications half sunk back into
nature, its majestic church, its description by Goethe, the fact that it
was the birthplace of two famous Alsatian authors, Erckmann and
Chatrian,2 and the starting point of a memorable journey described in a
wonderful French schoolbook: A Tour of France by Two Children. How
often at the United Nations was I tempted to write a similar book
entitled A Tour of the World by Two Children!
Although war had been declared, there was little military activity at
the front. The Germans did not attack France until May of the following
year. For the moment, the daily communiqués were all alike:
"Some shooting and patrol activity on both sides of the Blies and the Saar Rivers."
Our evacuated town was apparently quite tranquil, and soon we heard
reports that some of the rich merchants were able to enter the city with
trucks and evacuate their merchandise. The refugees who lived in the
region were very bitter about this. One of the main topics of
conversation among them was how to get hold of a winter coat. With the
onset of the war this merchandise had disappeared from the stores. We
too wished to go home and bring back clothes and some of our belongings,
but we were not given any permits. I became deeply infuriated with
this injustice when I saw trucks carrying merchandise from our hometown
drive through the streets of Phalsbourg toward safer places. I talked
with the drivers and indeed they were evacuating the merchandise from
the stores of the rich merchants. I sat down and wrote a letter to Mr.
Edouard Daladier, the Prime Minister of France, describing the
conditions of the refugees on the eve of winter and the privileged
treatment being given to the rich, who, as usual, had the right
connections. I did not mince my words and I found it prudent not to
show my letter to my mother before mailing it.
In the meantime she had convinced a French officer to give her and a
friend a pass to a place called Rohrbach, where the husband of the
latter was serving in the Maginot Line. The two women hired a taxi and a
driver, pulled down the curtains inside the car — at that time
automobiles had elegant interior curtains and even little vases for
flowers — and we traveled happily through the combat zone to the Maginot
Line, where the husband of my mother's friend was called out of the
underground fortress and had a joyous reunion with his wife. The
soldiers were all from Alsace-Lorraine. They offered us a mighty fine
meal, and I listened attentively to their conversations carried out in
our dialect. Thus I became aware of another injustice:
They were bitterly complaining that there were so few "Frenchmen" on the
front. Most troops consisted of Alsace-Lorrainers and colonial
regiments. Only the officers were "French". My compatriots did not
hide their intention not to fight under such circumstances if the
Germans attacked. They had no illusions either regarding the outcome.
One of them who had served as a German officer in World War I told us
that when he joined his French regiment he was ordered to guard a bridge
with a stick because there were no weapons! These facts as well as the
disastrous defeat of France a year later never left my mind. Whenever I
hear someone laud the superiority of the French intelligentsia, I
cannot help remember how some of these brainy geniuses had mismanaged
the country, letting it be crushed within a few weeks by a ridiculous,
uneducated little corporal-painter called Adolf Hitler. The Maginot
Line itself, the costly brainchild of such a genius, proved to be
totally useless: Hitler's planes overflew it and his tanks and infantry
invaded France via Belgium.
My mother wanted to press her luck and go to our hometown, located right
on the border. We reached the entrance of the city, but at a
checkpoint a French officer looked into our car and when he saw two
women and a boy circulating freely in the combat zone, he blew his top
and had us expelled by the shortest route under military escort.
Despite this unsuccessful ending, we had greatly enjoyed our trip and
the two women were very proud of their exploit.
A few days later, knocks at our poor little attic door woke us up late
in the evening. My mother opened the door and we saw two gendarmes
(policemen) from Phalsbourg, who asked whether a certain Robert Muller
lived there. I reviewed rapidly in my mind whether I had committed any
mischief, but I could not remember any. My mother offered chairs to the
two men. One of them extracted from a leather bag a bundle of papers
on top of which I saw my letter to the Prime Minister! It was
underlined in red in several places and annotated in the margin. The
gendarme said to my mother:
"Your son's letter has been read and annotated by the Prime Minister
himself. He has asked the proper department to investigate his
accusations and these papers are all reports prepared in response to his
request. Apparently your son has won his case. We have been
instructed to issue passes to you and to all the refugees in the
region. You will be able to go home and bring back your possessions.
Please come to our office tomorrow morning. We will put a small truck
and a driver at your disposal. Here is your laissez-passer."
I had remained mouse-still during the entire conversation.
Nevertheless, when the two gendarmes left, they threw me a nasty look
which I interpreted as a mixture of nastiness and admiration for a
rotten kid who had the guts to write directly to the Prime Minister!
My mother did not allow me this time to accompany her, but when she
returned from our hometown with a truckload of clothes, linen, blankets
and preserves, she had a wonderful and thoughtful gift for me: in a
large box she had rescued and brought for me the seventeen volumes of my
beloved German encyclopedia, which my grandfather had given to me: an
1894 edition of the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. It remained one of
the few memorabilia from my youth, because when we returned home in
1940, our house had been completely plundered. Later, in America, I
would show its beautiful illustrations to my sons, as my father and
grandfather had shown them to me.
I have drawn two important lessons from this anecdote:
First — if you see an injustice, do not wait for a better world;
denounce it right away to the person at the top, even if you have little
chance of being heard; you will at least feel better and sometimes you
might even get results.
Secondly — when I became myself a close collaborator of three
Secretaries-General of the UN, I made it a point to ensure that worthy
letters written by humble, well-intentioned people were always seen by
them, acted upon and answered. The right to complain and to receive a
reply should be made a basic human right, for government is here for the
people and not for the tranquility of the bureaucrats.
Later I learned that President John Kennedy set the rule that every
hundredth letter from the vast amount of mail a President receives every
day from citizens be handed to him unopened, so that he could read it
and keep in touch with his people. This good practice should be adopted
by the heads of state of all countries of the world. It would break
the barriers which their entourage usually builds around them under the
pretext of protecting their time. And in the year 2001, at the UN
University for Peace and Earth Council in demilitarized Costa Rica, I
was happy to learn that a position of Ombudsman would be created to
receive unattended complaints from people all over the world. May God
bless the incumbent of that new position. And may my story encourage
people to write to their heads of state and parliamentarians.
