Harold
Papineau
May 7, 2001
Marie Kalinowski was just a child at the time of World War
II. In this following exert she
explains how she was effected by the war and the effort that she and her mother
had to put into it.
HP: Where you aware of the War?
MK: Yes, because we had
air raid drills, where a siren would go off in the neighborhood and it could
be, once it got dark, you know when it was dark out, and you had to make sure,
we had many big windows in this house, you had to make sure that every window
had its blackout shade down because in the event, this was a practice, and in
the event that the enemy should come into our country
we didn’t want to provide any targets for them. So, at any rate, people did
this and I remember a man would come upstairs, we lived on the second floor,
and I can remember that a man would come upstairs and knock on the door and I remember that he had, I was
impressed, he had a long flashlight and he had a hard, like a helmet on. He was the, what do you call it now, Warden,
he was the air raid warden. It usually
was somebody that was from your neighborhood area because they just couldn’t
ship people everywhere for this practice.
It would be somebody in the neighborhood that wasn’t in the service and “just
checkin everything’s O.K.. And if by
any chance you had a shade up and the light seeped through, he certainly made a
call to your home to let you know that you had breached that practice drill and
to make sure that you fastened that shade correctly and you didn’t do that
again.
HP: Now how did these air raid drills make you
feel?
MK: I wasn’t really afraid of them. I think probably
because of my mothers attitude, certainly influenced me. She would say “Well you know, it’s time now
that we have to do our part.” Kind of
that was one of the things that many of the parents of the children that I
played with and knew that their parents would say that we have to do this and
we were nurtured into feeling that we had a part. We really didn’t always know a part of what but we had something
to do and felt that we were helping out.
One of the things as a child that I remember we did, when women fried
food and cooked their food, they saved the grease from the frying pans. That
was used, part of the war effort was to collect that grease and bring it to a central
location and for my mother, when I think back now, it was a hardship and probably it was for many other people, but
maybe once a month that grease, and I remember she would have a piece of cheese
cloth over the coffee can so that no particles of food would get in so that
grease was pure liquid, of course it would harden if she put it in the
refrigerator and if one container would be full she would put it in the
refrigerators that it wouldn’t be rancid.
About once a month we would take a bus, wed have to go down onto the
street below our home, and take a bus into East Hartford Center and there was a
collection place there and we used to bring our grease to that location and
somehow or another they used it in the war effort. I do not know if they took it to plants where they were producing
equipment for the war, or if it was
just used to lubricate things, I really have no idea of exactly how it was
used. But we did it faithfully and I
can remember in my grandmothers house there was a container, in my aunts house,
all our neighbors, so it was like everyone was faithful to this.
I also remember something, I do not know, it probably was related to the
war effort as well where when a lightbulb would burn out in your home, you
would save it and not throw it in the garbage and we would return those
lightbulbs that were burned out to the same place. Probably we were saving the metal at the base of the bulb because
certainly the filament had broken and maybe they recycled the glass at that
time, maybe they would brake it. I do
not know exactly how they used that at that time but we would get new bulbs at
that location, you couldn’t go to just any store and buy these items, and so
wed be back in business to have our lightbulbs. The other thing with that air raid, you were not supposed to have
an excess of lights on, going back to that.
You could have a light on in the room you were in.