By Teerin Byrne
This story is from the chapter, The Storykeeper, which is about the documentary film made by Erin Byrne and Rogier Van Beeck Calkoen. René Psarolis was seven years old in 1944, in Nazi-occupied Paris, when a USAF B-17 bomber crashed in his neighborhood. What René ultimately did shows how we can take the stories that touch us and offer them to the world in a way that unleashes the power of the universe.
René Psarolis was happily wrapped in his own insulated world. He trailed behind his brother Henri, walked hand-in-hand with his papa, and bloomed under the care of his maman, who cleared a path for light in the darkness of the German occupation.
René’s maman had dark hair and eyes, with a level brow identical to the one he saw in the mirror. Her steady smile created deep creases from her mouth to her nose, and made it impossible for René to stay miserable or afraid.
All across this earth, a young boy’s mother instinctively knows the precise dose of the poisonous evil of the outside world that her boy can integrate into his psyche without it spilling into his soul. She cannot prevent exposure to violence or wickedness, especially in a country trapped in a brutal occupation or suffering the ravages of war, but according to his temperament, she runs the worst atrocities through a filter of sketchy details, vague explanations and sudden distractions so that her boy receives life’s shocks in smaller, less lethal doses.
If a mother is vigilant, the dangerous possibility of becoming a target himself remains a hazy idea that hovers beyond her son’s radius. But like the tip of a pin approaching a balloon, reality advances toward the boy gradually, until all at once it bursts in.
Wise is the mother who knows that, though she shields her son, she has no real control over when this moment occurs.
