The Forbidden Zone 1940

A gripping account of a young Scottish lass caught up in the German Occupation of France. The Forbidden Zone 1940 by Anne Angelo is a heartwarming tale of Survival under terrible conditions. Welcome to this edition of Newsgram.  Today you’re going to meet Anne Angelo. A very brave woman who escaped from France in 1941. France was […]

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A gripping account of a young Scottish lass caught up in the German Occupation of France. The Forbidden Zone 1940 by Anne Angelo is a heartwarming tale of Survival under terrible conditions.

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram. 

Today you’re going to meet Anne Angelo. A very brave woman who escaped from France in 1941. France was a very different country back then. In 1941 the Nazi’s occupied northern France and France’s Atlantic coastline all the way down to the border with Spain. It was a significant portion of the country and she lived in an area called “The Forbidden Zone”  an area that Hitler had cordoned off and used as his springboard to invade Britain. 

Anne is no longer with us but thankfully she took the time to write down her experiences back in 1949.  

Hugh Hyland – She died in 1999 and then Covid came along three years ago and I was just rummaging through stuff and I came across a briefcase full of her manuscript. 

That’s Hugh Hyland, Anne’s son who recently published her manuscript with the help of Xlibris. It contains a very detailed account of her life. Here is Hugh with a quick overview of his findings. 

Hugh Hyland – It was divided into two sections. The first one was her being brought up in Scotland and having to escape from the clutches of her wicked father to France as a Governess in the 1930’s. The second chandre was her actually being in the Northwest of France. In 1940-1941 the Germans came through and she joined the French resistance and eventually she had to escape to get back to Scotland. That’s the basis behind everything 

The two sections of her manuscript have now been compiled into two different books. The first one is called A Sprig of White Heather and a Scottish Lass where she talks about her childhood in Invergordon, Ross-shire, in the Highlands of Scotland where she lived until she was twenty. It was not a happy childhood. In fact, she says it was one of hatred, heart-break, fear, disillusionment and despair which is why she left and went to France. 

Hugh Hyland – Getting out of her clutches of her father and going to Lille in the Northwest of France in the 1930’s. 

And for a moment all seemed right with the world. She enjoyed France. It was there that she fell in love in a rather unusual way. 

Hugh Hyland – One evening she was in a motor accident. She got run into by a British Army vehicle and that’s where she met Gerald. She fell in love with him there while the Germans were still on the other side of the border but then he had to get back to England once the Germans crossed over and the British withdrew. She was left stranded there but she was unsuccessful. 

So she stayed, taking care of the house which turned into a hotel but it was still home. She also joined the French resistance. In chapter one she writes about how “Gerald came and went and life dragged on…” She saw the skies black with planes all day long and she knew she was going to lose her home one day. 

Hugh Hyland  – The stories got a bit of everything. Part of the story is her upbringing. finding a new life in France and also throughout Europe and the second part of the story is actually in the war and the escape and all the horrendous things that happened during the war and also the love story  that intermingled with all of that. 

Another thing I found interesting about this story was the various themes she explores. One of them is Nature vs. Nurture. How our lives are shaped by circumstances beyond our control. Is all this a preordained fate that we are destined to live out? Are we consciously or unconsciously in control of our lives? Are we being shaped by our environment and the choices of our parents? Here’s an excerpt from The Forbidden Zone 1940. Chapter One. “Reflections”

(Exerpt) “…What a contrast to the stark life in Scotland where I’d been brought up. Some people think we ourselves are responsible for what we become, but it’s not so. What we are is almost complete­ly due to things beyond our control. We make some decisions­ yes, of course, but they’re really only relatively small ones. Even they are made in the light of what’s happened to us in the past. Shakespeare makes Cassius in Julius Caesar say, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.’ But he is wrong. What we are is basically in our stars and not in ourselves. ‘Stars’ has nothing to do with it. It plans the circumstances and environment into which we are born. Primarily, we are the result of the genes we inherit from our par­ents. After we’re born, the lives our parents have lived have their effect on us. We are further shaped by the place we live, the cli­mate, and what happens to us in our formative years. Everybody we meet has an influence on us, either for good or bad. I’d tolerat­ed my father’s harsh treatment while growing up, not because I wanted to, but because I had no choice. I hoped I had not inherit­ed his heartlessness and selfishness…”

Hugh Hyland – She had pluck. She had courage. She was a survivor. She could sort of manage to survive and not give up so that was one theme. Another theme was the love in the first part. the first few months where she and Gerald were getting very, very close together before he had to disappear. Then there’s the cruelty of war you know you have the stories of the refugees all being machine gunned and all the rest of it and a lot of that you sort of see happening right now in Ukraine so history tends to um, just repeat itself. 

History does repeat itself. One of the nice takeaways here is that while it may sound familiar it’s still different in a number of ways mainly because this one is true and there are other recollections and visuals that you’ll enjoy like this one. 

Hugh Hyland – She used to tell me about some of the horrendous things. Escaping from the Northwest of France down to Paris initially with the refugees and being machine-gunned and dead horses and bomb craters and you name it.  It was so horrendous in winter up there. They had no food. It was freezing cold so occasionally she would go up to a German soldier and kick him in the shin just to get thrown into jail where she could get a couple of days of food. 

Plus the story takes place in a specific region of France. 

Hugh Hyland – This is specific to the Forbidden Zone. Most of the people I’ve talked to said what’s the forbidden zone? Why did it get its name? What was so special about it?  So, that was a very special niche area for when the Germans were preparing to invade England and they had everything locked down even more so up there so this story is basically how civilians were living in the Forbidden Zone in the middle of winter. No food, no heating. That was a very sort of austere  survival. The Germans would come along and shoot people for the sake of shooting them. 

You can’t say enough bad things about Nazis. They are the absolute embodiment of evil and I’ll leave you with this. There are lots of things to like about Anne Angelo’s manuscript, the parenting issues, the romance, the various themes that we talked about but also the reminder that history does repeat itself and if reading about how things were can do anything to help keep us from repeating the sins of our past and the days of Naziism then in my opinion, it’s time well spent. 

Hugh Hyland published his mothers original manuscript written in 1949 and its now available in two books.  A Sprig of White Heather and a Scottish Lass and the most recent,  The Forbidden Zone 1940 for anyone interested in the history of German Occupation in WW2, and how a young lady was able to survive the hardships and cruelty of war.

And that will do it for this edition of Newsgram from Webtalkradio.com. 

Listen to an interview with Hugh Hyland on the Books on Air podcast. 

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