A pair of Foreign Legionnaires fighting Viet Minh in an ambush, 1952
TL;DR Summary:
  • French Indochina, 1949-1950
  • Historical/Psychological Thriller
  • The French retook Indochina (Vietnam) after the Japanese occupied it in WWII, but encountered stiff resistance from the Vietnamese, who seek to dismantle the French colonial system in favor of self-rule.
  • I have two characters; the Pole and the German. I am looking for a player to take up the role of the French nurse that is married to the German.
  • The French nurse married to the German; the German is trying to escape his past and the Pole wants to kill the German for it; the Pole will find himself in the same hospital, unbeknownst to either party, that the French Nurse works at.
  • The French nurse herself is a survivor of WWII, but of an age with the Pole. How she spent the war is up to you, the player. She could have been in France when it was occupied/liberated (possibly Resistance -- teenagers fought and died for France as maquis) or she might have been in exile in Britain or Canada. That's your end.
  • Advanced Standards
  • Based on a true story; both "Street Without Joy" by Bernard Fall and "Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt.
  • At least a couple paragraphs per post, possibly more.
In Character Info:
Noms de guerre (French phrase meaning "names of war" or "war names") were frequently adopted by recruits in the French Foreign Legion as part of the break with their past lives.
The tale starts in Poland, where two very different men, a Silesian German man and a Warsaw Jewish boy both hail from. The German is a grown man with a university education and a commission in the Schutzstaffel (SS), the police-military arm of the Nazi party. He oversees the slave labor of Jews in the ghettos and the concentration camps on behalf of the department of labor within the SS. He is reckoned a war criminal by the Allies. The boy, the son of a Warsaw professor of physics, manages to escape the fate of many Polish Jews; his father has him shipped to France to stay with a colleague's family, before Poland falls in 1939. When the Germans bring the thunder of their Blitzkrieg to France in 1940, he escapes again, this time to Great Britain. There, he lies about his age and joins the war fighting for a King and Country that are not his. When the war is over, the two men go their separate ways; many Germans join the French Foreign Legion. The French gladly take in these men, even though many of them are wanted war criminals and the invaders and occupiers of la France, yet their need for troops in far-flung corners of their failing empire, in places like Indochina and Algeria, outweigh such considerations. These men are given new names and are hidden. The German man signs his name and joins his kameraden in la Légion étrangère. The Polish boy, now a man, leaves Europe behind for Palestine, joining the camp survivors and many other refugees to build the new Jewish homeland. There is little peace to be found and he fights a second war as part of the newly-founded Israeli Defense Forces. Eventually he locates people, camp survivors, that he once knew as a child, people who knew his family, and he finds out the bitter details; where and when it happened and who did it. He even manages to find reliable information that the man joined the Foreign Legion. While he is a serving soldier of the Israeli Defense Forces, he requests transfer to the Navy. When his ship pulls into Genoa, he jumps ship and makes for Marseilles, France, the home of the Legion, at least in France. The Polish man signs his name and takes on a nom de guerre in la Légion étrangère. The German man is sent to to fight the Communists, the Viet Minh, in Indochine (Vietnam) where he meets and secretly marries a French nurse; she doesn't care about his past, and he doesn't go into details -- the past is done. Together, they plan for a bright and happy future with each other; she with the sort of charming man she always dreamed of, and he putting his own black deeds well behind him by adopting a new name in the Legion and obtaining French citizenship. Meanwhile, the young Pole is wounded in battle, and he winds up in the same hospital, in Hanoi, where the French nurse works. He has stories to tell; the past isn't as done as she thinks it is.
Out of Character Info:
The plot is simple; the Pole is going to kill the German, but he's going to have to wrangle information out of the French woman to do it. He has to track the German down somehow, and doesn't have much information to work with. It may well be that they become friends and he tells her why he's there. Sympathy turns to shock as the tale unfolds and he describes the killer of his family, a callous, amoral monster...and her husband. There's a lot of psychological, emotional and moral choices involved. How you'd care to play it is up to you, I'm down with whatever the outcome. There is a twisted element to this, of course. There's a potential for a sordid affair, guilt and conspiracy to murder. There's a lot of potential in the plot, but I'm looking for input, more or less, on where to take it. There is another twist, of course...the German is wealthy from the ill-gotten proceeds of the war years. Or at least, he has that wealth stashed away. Hello multiple motives and plot twists. This is actually based on a true case; there was no woman involved, but an Israeli man did kill the man who had his family massacred, while both were serving as legionnaires in Indochina. When he came back after his time in the legion, he was tried for desertion in Israel, but was acquitted. He was even praised -- one less Nazi in the world. That's just a cool postscript, something I read in Bernard Fall's "Street Without Joy" a while ago. But it makes for a heck of a 1x1 idea.