Cape Breton senior recalls life in German-occupied France, mother’s death during Second World War

N.S. woman’s unforgettable grief 96-year-old Christiane Tanner will never forget what the Second World War took from her.

It has been 80 years since Christiane Tanner's mother was shot and killed by German soldiers during the Second World War.

The Cape Breton senior still vividly remembers the day it happened near the end of the war in 1944.

"My mother's brother called us, and he said, 'Your mother has been shot,” Tanner recalled on Sunday, the day before Remembrance Day.

Tanner was 16-years-old when her mother was killed while cycling across a bridge manned by German troops on her way home from picking up grass to feed rabbits in her garden.

She is now 96, and has been living in her home in Westmount, N.S., for decades.

As a teenager, she spent four years living under German occupation in her native France.

"When we came back from the evacuation (to a town in Spain), when we came home.. we had a big house,” Tanner remembered. “A beautiful, big house, and the Germans had taken the house for themselves."

After what she remembers as a peculiar time, living with the enemy, France was liberated by Allied troops - beginning with the storming of the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

"But, I did not have a mother. That was more important to me than the end of the war,” Tanner said.

Still, the war's end allowed her to move on with her life and eventually to England where she met the man who would be her husband.

What brought her husband Jeff - and eventually Christiane - to Cape Breton was the construction of the Seal Island Bridge in 1960, which he was working on.

"I came to see it, and he said, 'Maybe we could live here,’” Tanner said.

All these years later, Tanner says Remembrance Day comes with mixed feelings.

Though living in Cape Breton for as long as she has, she has always been grateful for the Canadian soldiers who helped free her home country from occupation.

"And I watch it (Remembrance Day services), you know, and think of those soldiers who liberated us in the landing on the north,” Tanner said. “But I think to me, it's a moment of sadness as much as joy. To think, '10 days later, she would have survived.. this would not have happened.'"

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