In praise of author and popular CFP columnist Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh on Wednesday’s column ‘Half a Loaf of Bread, commenter Hans PFall points out most eloquently “only those who have not had freedom truly cherish it.”
As a child growing up in Communist Romania, Ileana longed for the freedom of the United States of America, dreaming from afar that she would one day grow up and make it to that ‘shining city on a hill’, which she eventually did.
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Just as we are about to celebrate 2017, PFall takes us back to the film ‘Casablanca’, which was set in Nazi-occupied Morocco:
“There is a scene set in a cafe where the patrons, in defiance of the Nazis, start singing La Marseillaise. There is a shot of actress Madeleine Lebeau with tears in her eyes as she sings. That is not acting. She had just come over after escaping occupied France.
“If anyone needs to know what it means to lose your freedom, just look at that face, those eyes. That's all you need to know.”
Madeleine Lebeau, was so much more than a flickering image on a long ago film. Her New York Times obituary stated that she had “attained movie immortality with one scene, when the camera zoomed in on her tear-stained face as she sang “La Marseillaise” in “Casablanca”.
But Ms. Lebeau, being real, attained so much more than “movie mortality”, immortalizing the very meaning of ‘Freedom’.
As PFall points out, she wasn’t acting, “at 19 years of age, she had just come over after escaping occupied France”.
Some people end their lives in a newspaper obit, but icons like Madeleine Lebeau go on to live in human memory forever.
“Ms. Lebeau was 19 when she was cast in “Casablanca” as Yvonne, the spurned girlfriend of Rick Blaine, the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, played by Humphrey Bogart. (New York Times, May 17, 2016)
“In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Nazi officers in the cafe begin singing the patriotic song “Watch on the Rhine,” whereupon the Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid, orders the house band to strike up the French national anthem.
“One by one, the bar’s patrons rise and join in, drowning out the Germans. As the song nears its stirring finale, the camera closes in on Yvonne, her face lit with patriotic fervor, tears streaming from her eyes as she sings. At the song’s conclusion, the camera swings toward her again as she shouts a defiant “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!”
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“She was a free woman who lived by her own rules, totally inhabiting the roles entrusted to her by leading directors,” the French culture minister Audrey Azoulay said of Ms. Lebeau in a statement on Monday. “She will forever be the face of French resistance.”
Freedom seekers from the Nazis and Communists , having made it to the West, often spend their lives trying to remind us what happens when the light goes out on freedom, liberty and democracy.
In her books and columns Ileana Johnson Paugh is one such light in the threatening darkness.
Some come from Romania, some from other countries oppressed as Soviet satellites, and today—even after the death of brutal dictator Fidel Castro—the oppressed, freedom seeking people of Cuba.
Until November 8, in the same year that Madeleine Lebeau died at age 92, America was headed in the same direction of oppression.
Lovers of a Free West have much to be grateful for this Christmas.
To the never to be forgotten words of a 19-year-old escapee from Nazi-occupied France, who defiantly shouted “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” meaning every word, can be added: “Vive la United States of America.
Or, in the language of America’s long suffering patriots: “USA!USA!”
Judi McLeod——Bio and Archives
-- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
