Only a handful of World War II veterans still survive.  Soon, they will be gone.

Most of our knowledge of that bitter and bloody conflict comes from books, films, TV shows, and the stories of a shrinking number of elderly veterans. If you get a chance, chat with Boothbay veterans George Whitten, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, or John Druce, a Marine lieutenant who served in the Pacific.

The movies tell us tales of mud-caked GIs slogging up the Italian boot, sailors braving restless seas and hidden submarines, airmen flying into danger, and marines surviving the Pacific island jungles.

For Boothbay Harbor’s Florence Rosenberg, who says she is 86 and three quarters, the memories of that era are as vivid as yesterday’s sunset. Last week, she told of how she stood on the seventh-floor balcony of her family’s Paris apartment and watched the German army roll into the city of lights. She saw a huge red flag emblazoned with the Nazi swastika hanging from the Arc de Triomphe as storm troopers paraded in a victory.

She watched as friends and neighbors were arrested and sent to their doom. She ducked and hid in shelters as Allied bombers targeted the auto manufacturing factory located a few blocks away from her home. She saw Germans cheer as they shot down British planes.

She remembers spending a lot of time in her school’s chapel hoping and praying that her family would survive.

“It worked. We survived,” she said.

From 1939 to 1944, as her hometown, Paris, was occupied by the German Army, she was taught to keep secrets. Her father, a public works official helped maintain roads and bridges and supported the resistance effort to gather information on German troop movements.

After the Allies landed at Normandy in June 1944, Nazis arrested her father.

“They tortured him, but he wouldn’t talk, so they put him in a room with one of his friends who was also an informant.”

But, as the American and British forces got closer to Paris, the “informant” decided it was no longer a good idea to help the Germans, so he switched sides and helped her father escape. They jimmied the bars off the windows, tied bed sheets together and lowered themselves down the side of the building. “Father had his shoes tied together around his neck, but he slipped and fell into a bush, broke his wrist and lost his shoes,” she said.

Her father made his way to a friendly doctor and escaped and made his way to the resistance groups. Meanwhile, police arrested her family: Mother, sister, baby brother and their maid. Two German policemen moved into their apartment in hopes her father might try to come home.

Her mother told Florence a secret. Her father had left an address book on top of the radio and a key to a place where he stored information. They were to keep them from the cops. The brave young daughter grabbed both items and hid them in the baby’s toy box.

As allied forces moved closer to Paris, the Germans got nervous and left the family alone. Her mother then dyed one of the baby’s diapers red and another blue. She hung the red and blue diapers and a white one over the balcony railing to represent a French flag.

“The Germans saw that and started shooting at our balcony, so, mother took them down.”

On Aug. 23, the Allies made sure the Free French Army was the first group to march into Paris.

“We heard about it and, the next day, we crossed the Seine and greeted them. We climbed on the tanks and, my God, did they get kissed that day.”

The next day, the American troops marched into Paris and paraded in the Place de la Concorde. “We cheered them and were fascinated by the Jeeps,” she said. It was the first time she had ever heard the “Star Spangled Banner.”

This week, Florence was at her post in Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library’s used bookstore helping to raise funds to help her adopted community. Relating the details of the ways she and her family were able to survive the horrors of the Nazi occupation that saw thousands of French citizens, in addition to the  Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others, rounded up and sent to the death camps.

“But, we survived,” she said.

This quiet woman with the engaging smile and hint of a French accent, had tears in her eyes as she shared the feelings of joy as she told of the liberation of Paris. During the two-hour interview, it was not the only time she shed a tear. 

“I still cry every time I listen to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she said.