“When I was a kid, I used to spend most of my time with my grand-parents.

Their tellings were so precise, that War never was a matter of the past, but a tangible fact for me. 
In 1942, my grand-father, as a “Despite-Us“ Mosello-Alsatian, was forced to join the Wehrmacht.
At the same period, my grand-mother and a friend, hiding from the guards, were feeding a few Soviet prisoners, mainly men, parked in a small camp on the other side of the street. 
It was risky, as one of the guards was a bit nervous with his Mauser trigger.  
This camp had been settled in a stone quarry, a ravine, and the prisoners were due to break stones and move earth. Hard conditions and poor feeding … of course. Others were requisitioned in mines. Inside the deep bowels of the iron mines, you could also find women and young girls, who had to clean the streams. 
One day, one of the men asked for a wide leather belt. After a while and surely to thank her, he gave back to my grand-mother a pair of tiny shoes made from the belt, for my new-born uncle. Like so many others, the little boy was a Bab'Y in the storm ...

I was a teenager when I discovered how serious the disaster had been in the East of Europe. I then imagined that this grateful prisoner was a Jewish father from Kiev-Ukraine. It was pure speculation of course, but it remained and still does in my mind. We have to remind, that in front of Paul Blobel and his "Einsatzgruppen's" troops, were left only kids with their mums and old people. All the men were fighting at the front, or already prisoners. 

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This is why I chose to put into light these destinies crossing, through this long musical piece.
As you will have understood, this overlap of musical periods from dark on one side, to a more joyful one on the other side, is the symbol of the neverending balancing between hope and defeatism, defeatism and hope, with in the background, the power of survival (the last theme evoking the Babi Yar survivors) and then, the ultimate defeat of the criminal nazi racism.

This is how this suite never occurred to me as being solely sad.
 

I hope that people will understand …“    G                       Letter for Marie B., October the 8th 2018