Denise Duesing (Photo by Jay Paul)
Her mission: a baguette.
Flour was scarce during the German occupation of France in World War II. So when Denise Duesing heard that a bakery five miles away from her village had real bread, she volunteered to go on her bike and buy some for her family.
As 8-year-old Denise rode along the deserted country road, a German plane began circling overhead. Terrified, she pedaled faster. The plane landed in a field, and the pilot got out.
“I think from the air, he thought I was older,” she says. When the pilot realized Duesing was just a little girl, he got back in the plane and took off.
She raced to the bakery and bought the bread. On the way home, her tire went flat. Desperate to make it to school for her afternoon lesson, she ran alongside the bike, gnawing on the bread.
Then, disaster: Her pen and pencil weren’t in her book bag. The teacher reprimanded her for her carelessness.
“That was just too much for me,” she says. “I was sobbing silently, and nobody saw that I was crying.”
Childhood, for Denise Duesing, demanded unfailing courage.
She was born to Polish parents in 1934 in Jarny, a small city in northeastern France. Her father worked in an iron mine alongside other Polish and Italian immigrants. Every Sunday they’d dress up for church, browse the windows of the town’s shops and then join everyone at a corner cafe for dancing as a band played.
Then war broke out. When Jarny was bombed in June 1940, its residents were told to evacuate. Duesing and her family ended up in Saint-Étienne, a coal-mining town south of Lyon. In 1941, there was a deadly explosion in the mine. A guard rushing to the scene saw a tuft of hair sticking out of the rubble and pulled out Duesing’s father, just in time.
The family resolved to return home to Jarny, even though it meant crossing into Nazi-occupied France. Her father went first, then sent for them. Duesing, her mother and brothers joined a caravan of around 80 people heading north. They traveled at night, surviving on foraged chestnuts.
As they trudged through the forest, they heard dogs barking. A German patrol had tracked them down. Duesing’s mother couldn’t run with an 18-month-old and two young children, and so they were captured. One of the soldiers shoved Duesing to the ground, skinning her knee. Another German picked her up and carried her back to her mother.
The next morning, the Nazis marched the starving prisoners to a train of cattle cars bound for an internment camp. It was stalled, waiting for a locomotive. The soldier who had helped Duesing came over and showed them a photograph: “He had three little children, the same age we were,” she recalls.
At gunpoint, the soldier escorted Duesing and her family around the train, so they were out of sight. In broken Polish, he instructed them to run along the railroad tracks and escape.
They made it to Jarny, but not to safety. “We did live with danger. Constantly,” Duesing says. Germans were stationed in the next village. Bombs buzzed overhead. Once, a German soldier found Duesing playing alone in a field. He pulled his gun and commanded her to come to him. His pants were undone, she remembers. She ran.
Another time, three Jewish teenagers arrived in the town, fleeing the Nazis. The two boys kept going, but the exhausted girl collapsed. “My mother took the girl in,” Duesing says, “but we were so afraid. If you hide a Jew, you were shot.” The girl stayed three days, until she recovered her strength, and then continued her flight.
The Americans liberated Paris on Aug. 25, 1944. But the peril, for Duesing, had not ended. One day she was carrying soup to her mother’s twin sister, who had tuberculosis, when a car full of fleeing Germans sped down the road. “And they decided to run over me!” she says. Seventy-five years later, she still sounds surprised.
Duesing dove into a ditch to avoid them. The car executed a U-turn and headed back toward her. They missed Duesing, but spotted a village man. “They grabbed him and put him in the car, and we never saw him again.”
The next day, the first American tank rolled into Varny. “By one day, I almost didn’t make it,” she says. “By one day.”
The war’s end meant a new life for Duesing. She and her mother took in a baby girl whose mother was unable to care for her. Duesing later formally adopted the girl, named Carole.
When she was 21, she got a turquoise Vespa scooter. On her first ride, she careened through a village crowd that had gathered to see the circus, then eluded the pursuing police. (“That’s the only trouble I’ve gotten into,” she says.)
She secured a job in the officer’s club at the nearby American army base, then was promoted to secretary. There, she met Billy Duesing, an Army sergeant from West Virginia. They married in 1962, moved to the United States and had six sons. Billy died in 2012, after 50 years of marriage.
When her youngest was just 4, Duesing answered a newspaper ad for Henrico County crossing guards. Her first day on the job was Feb. 6, 1979 — a snow day, as it turned out.
Duesing will mark 40 years as a Henrico County crossing guard in February. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Every school day since, Duesing has shown up at Chamberlayne Elementary School at 7 a.m. It’s 15 degrees when she arrives on a recent Tuesday morning, the sun peering reluctantly over the rooftops. In her neon-yellow jacket, shined shoes and crisp police hat, Duesing is as chipper as a robin.
Two students live across from the school. When Duesing sees the girl appear at her front door, she strides into the intersection. Whistle trilling, she stops traffic.
“Good morning!” she calls. “Where’s your brother?”
Five minutes later, he appears. Duesing blows her whistle again as he plods across the street.
She never lets down her guard. “Once in a while, they just don’t stop,” she says. “They don’t even see you.”
Duesing waves at drivers to slow down when they speed through the school zone. She’s trained to help lead children to a designated safe place, should there be an emergency at the school. She has done safety education for thousands of county kids with the “Officer Ollie” program. In 2015, she was recognized by VDOT as one of Virginia’s Most Outstanding Crossing Guards. (Another Henrico honoree, Virginia Haden, has more than 47 years of service.)
Duesing has also volunteered as a translator for the county courts and a caretaker at the animal shelter. A lifelong Catholic, she holds vigils for dying patients as part of the Sacred Passages program at Bon Secours, where she is a eucharistic minister.
Reflecting on her childhood, Duesing believes her wartime experiences changed her for the better. “Because, you know, I have been an immigrant, a foreigner, all my life. So I can feel for others. And being a refugee, I can feel for them, too. And it makes me want to help people, if I can.”
Duesing is a familiar, reassuring sight to parents, some of whom remember her from their own school days.
“Bonjour!” one mother calls out as she stops at the corner. “I miss you!”
Forty years ago, Duesing had as many as 40 children crossing the street each day. Now, she usually sees about a dozen. Parents don’t let their kids walk to school anymore. Too dangerous, they think.
The Henrico County Police Division is looking for people to fill crossing guard positions. Interested candidates can contact the department here.
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