I submitted a brief inquiry on Marcel to Daimler’s US Corporate Communications department using a form on the website. I hoped to hear back, but I did not expect I would. I had not received replies to any of the other letters or emails I had sent to various organizations.
When an email arrived two days later, in English, from a Daimler archivist in Stuttgart, Germany, my heart began to race. “In order to make further investigations,” the email read, “I want to ask you: What is the reason of your question? Have you any relations or references to Mr. Heuzé? I have to ask because your question is about confidential personal information.”
I felt like jumping up and dancing around my office. They know something! They’ve got to know something! But I sat in my chair, frozen, staring into my monitor, processing an unanticipated problem: if I acknowledged I was not related to Marcel, Daimler might not be able to tell me anything. They might be prohibited from sharing information with anyone other than family. It felt as if the answers I sought were hidden behind some kind of trapdoor.
I knew I should not lie. I knew I should not claim to be family. But dishonesty was a tempting path if it led to answers.
For a week, I held a fierce debate with myself.
After drafting my response to the Daimler employee, I read it to Aaron:
“Regarding my inquiry about Marcel Heuzé, no, I am not a relative, but I do have a deep personal connection to him. Please allow me to explain.
“I am a graphic designer and a type designer. Years ago I purchased a small collection of handwritten letters. I have no information about how these letters ended up in Minnesota. The letters are written in French, and although I could not read anything more than the occasional word, I purchased them because the extraordinary handwriting provided the inspiration for a computer font I have been designing.
“I began to wonder about the letters’ contents. Six months ago, I commissioned the translation of the first letter. Marcel wrote the letters to his wife and three daughters in France. The letters are written with tremendous affection—it’s heartbreaking to read how much he misses them. He states he thinks about them all the time.
“The letters include detail about his life working at the Daimler-Marienfelde factory, and I believe he was one of the many conscripted French civilians. He writes about many things. Food is a common topic. Mr. Heuzé talks about letters being censored, having to show his papers when traveling, mending clothes, the weather, and enjoying a soccer game despite the cold. The first letter was written February 1, 1943, and the last letter is postmarked April 4, 1944.
“I hope to find out he returned home and was reunited with his wife and his daughters. I realize not many World War II stories end happily, but I hope this is one story that does. I understand, though, the possibility of being injured at the factory, falling ill, or being killed in one of the bombings is a real potential outcome. So, too, is the possibility he was taken by the Russians when they gained control of Berlin. I have attempted to search for answers online, but I have not been able to find anything, which is why I contacted you.”
I outlined what I knew:
Name: Marcel Heuzé
Hometown: Berchères-la-Maingot, France
Dates at factory: Start date of January 12, 1943–April 1944 (or later)
His return address: Lager D4 West, Chambre 21/3, Berlin Marienfelde, Deutschland
“If you are able to share only one bit of information,” my email continued, “I am interested in finding out whether he was released to return home, or if you have a record of his death. If you are able to share any other information, I am also interested in learning what work he did at the Daimler factory because that may provide context for passages in his letters.”
I looked up at Aaron and shrugged. He asked me to repeat the name of the Daimler employee.
“Wolfgang,” I said.
“Volfgaaang. Offf course, hisss name ist Volfgaaang.” I rolled my eyes at Aaron’s comically thick, deep, mock-German accent.
“Where did you find the start date?” The specificity of Aaron’s question surprised me since he had not shown much interest in my search.
“In one letter Marcel said ‘today is the twelfth, exactly fourteen months since I started working at Daimler.’ I just did the math.”
After a few moments he nodded and said, “It’s good. Send it.”
In the end, I could not lie. I understood my decision might have consequences. I understood telling the truth might mean Wolfgang might not be able to give me information even if he wanted to. But it would have felt as if I was lying to Marcel, and I could not do that. If Wolfgang took anything from my email, I hoped he would see it was an earnest inquiry. And since I still did not have proof Marcel’s letters were real, I also hoped the information I outlined was true.
Yet, after sending the email, I could not shake a feeling of dread. I felt certain I had made the wrong choice by revealing everything. I felt certain I should have lied.
I had gotten into the habit of checking email every morning immediately after waking up. A couple of mornings later, an email from Wolfgang awaited. I did not yet have my glasses on, so I squinted and leaned close to my computer monitor. “Indeed,” Wolfgang wrote, “we have a handwritten record, in which Mr. Heuzé is mentioned as a worker in the Daimler-Benz plant Berlin-Marienfelde.”
Wolfgang outlined what their records showed:
Name: Marcel Heuzé
Born: January 26, 1912
Hometown: Boissy-le-Châtel
Family: Married. Wolfgang noted a numeral 3 had been written on the record, which he assumed meant three children.
Date of entrance: January 13, 1943
Date of leaving the factory: November 11, 1943
Working for: Department 210 as a turner
Home: Berlin-Marienfelde, Daimlerstraße
“There are some differences to your information, concerning the hometown and the period Mr. Heuzé was engaged in the plant. But I am convinced that Marcel Heuzé in our records matches with your Marcel Heuzé.” Wolfgang added, “We are sorry, we haven’t any additional information about the destiny of Marcel Heuzé.”
Wolfgang went on to note Marcel’s letters were of “high interest for our archives, as he describes the situation in the plant.”
Finally, Wolfgang explained that a book titled Forced Labor with Daimler-Benz included a chapter on Berlin-Marienfelde. He offered to send a PDF of the chapter, though he noted it was only available in German.
The room seemed to spin as I tried to make sense of everything: Was Boissy-le-Châtel home? Wolfgang’s start date was one day different than what I had figured—could that have been an issue of when paperwork was processed? Department 210 turner: what did that mean?
My mind returned to the words “date of leaving the factory: November 11.” My heart nearly burst in half from happiness. He went home! Marcel went home! Or he might have gone home; at least Wolfgang’s record had not included a record of his death.
I pushed back from the desk, and with an enormous smile, I geared up to take Hoover out for our morning walk. If any of our neighbors saw us, they might have been surprised to see how cheery I looked that cold winter morning. I trudged along in my boots and parka, but it felt as though I were one of those inflatable parade balloons floating fifty feet in the air, tethered to the ground by Hoover’s thin leash. He went home! Marcel went home!
Another thought materialized, and it felt as though a ton of bricks had just been lifted from my shoulders. I could not help but smile an even bigger smile. The birthdate Wolfgang provided was different than the birthdate of the Marcel who died in Ravensbrück. Wolfgang had just provided evidence confirming my Marcel was a different Marcel. My Marcel was real. That meant all of this was real: his love-filled letters, his affection for Vérane, Suzanne, Denise, and Lily, his cherry, pear, and plum trees. It was real.
But a second later, it felt as if every brick landed back on my shoulders with a heavy whump. It was real
: the Russians, the hunger, the desperate longing.
As Hoover and I continued our swing around the block, I calculated Marcel’s age. Marcel had started working for Daimler two weeks before his thirty-first birthday. He had been even younger than I guessed.
Forty-five minutes later, when I returned to my office showered and dressed for the day, I jotted a quick email to Wolfgang expressing my gratitude for his response. I confirmed my interest in the chapter he offered, and noted I would consider his request for the letters.
I yearned to look at the good news again, so I opened Wolfgang’s email and reread his message. A third of the way through, every cell in my body seemed to freeze. I stared at the monitor. I had initially misread something.
Wolfgang’s information could not be correct.
It just wasn’t … possible.
Chapter Nine
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
Late February 2012
Wolfgang’s record had to be wrong. It had to.
Marcel could not have left Marienfelde on November 11, 1943, because the second letter Tom translated had been sent from Marienfelde four months later: March 12, 1944. For a few long minutes, I sat motionless, processing the information in Wolfgang’s email, attempting to cobble together any answer that made sense.
Hours later, another email from Wolfgang arrived. He attached a black-and-white image of two expressionless men standing at long machines with belt-operated spindles. Neither man was Marcel, Wolfgang clarified, but he wanted me to see the type of work Marcel would have done as a dreher. Dreher, turner, lathe operator: these men ground, shaped, and polished metal pieces. The work required precision and specialty training.
As I imagined the scream of grinding metal and pictured those two men laboring at those machines day after day, week after week, I wondered: Did it seem as if hope was the thing they were grinding away?
Wolfgang also attached the chapter on Daimler-Marienfelde, as promised. It was in German, which meant I had to hire yet another translator. I corrected myself: I did not have to. But no doubt existed I was going to.
As I scrolled through the chapter’s pages, black-and-white before-and-after photos of the Marienfelde factory entrance caught my attention. The before photo showed a stout brick wall with a large arched entryway. A road ran below the center of the arch with pedestrian entrances on each side. Forty or more people flooded through the archways; I guessed they were workers leaving at the end of a shift. Three men walked bicycles. Two women walked arm-in-arm.
Above the center arch was a large sign showing a swastika inside a gear. Three words arced above the symbol; smaller words flanked each side. The small words were hopelessly indecipherable. But I did not even need an official translation to make sense of the large words. One year of high school German was enough. Wir marschieren mit. We march with.
The after image showed the same entrance. The bones of the archway still stood, but the stout brick wall had been obliterated and its rubble had been piled high. The two pedestrian entrances were blocked by debris. Three men, holding shovels or hoes, stood as a handful of pedestrians walked down the single-lane path open through the center.
It would be another a year and a half before I learned about the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The International Tracing Service is the central repository for documents on World War II incarceration, forced labor, and the Holocaust. Their mission is to “keep the memory of the millions of victims of Nazi persecution alive.”
Some documents in their archives came from the Red Cross; others had been confiscated by military units as camps were liberated. The International Tracing Service claimed to have materials indexed in a way that linked thirty million documents to more than seventeen million people.
For decades, their archives were only accessible to survivors and immediate family members, but in 2007 they were opened to researchers and other “interested parties.” I puffed up when I realized I met the definition of an interested party, and I submitted an inquiry.
Days later, an email arrived from a researcher named Birgit. A preliminary examination of their archives revealed “multiple references” for Marcel Heuzé, she noted. She wondered if I could provide any additional information. I speculated if Birgit found multiple Marcel Heuzés, she had also found the Marcel who had been murdered at Ravensbrück. In my reply, I clarified the Ravensbrück Marcel was a different man, and outlined everything I knew about my Marcel.
Birgit ultimately found nine documents. There was no cost for her research time, but she included a small invoice, payable via bank transfer, to order scans of those nine documents.
I was simultaneously surprised—and not surprised—that Birgit found nine records within an archive of thirty million documents in a matter of days. I had repeatedly read the Germans had been meticulous record keepers.
A nondescript brown envelope arrived a week and a half after the bank transfer went through. I popped Birgit’s CD into my computer and tried to make sense of the pages filled with columns of typed names and dates: Geburtstag. Birthday. Geburtsort. Birthplace. Frankreich. France. Dauer des Aufenthaltes. Length of stay.
One particular date caught my eye: 11.11.43.
The date sounded familiar, though it took a while to realize why. When I figured it out, my heart dropped like a stone: November 11, 1943, was the date Wolfgang claimed Marcel had left Marienfelde. Wolfgang’s information never made sense, but according to the scan in front of me, it had been true. Marcel indeed left Marienfelde on November 11, 1943.
On that day, Marcel had been transferred to Spandau Prison.
For a moment, I could not breathe.
The single document typed in French, not German, listed offenses committed by the men transferred to Spandau. Five were imprisoned for theft, three for concealment. Others had been imprisoned for contraband, forged handwriting, disloyalty, or for providing a false name. Two men were imprisoned for “faute c/règl.de consommation.”
That was Marcel’s offense. He had “run afoul of food regulations.”
“Punishable acts”—infractions considered disobedient but not criminal—were exempt from judicial review. Accusations did not require proof. Workers like Marcel could be transferred to a prison or a “corrective” camp without trial.
To add to the humiliation, “Foreign workers … absent from their working place for reasons such as serving a prison term … were to be considered as having stayed away from their work by default, ‘just as if they had been absent because they went “on a spree” or for some similar reason.’” Work contracts were extended by the length of the prison term.
A spree? A spree! Anger roiled through me.
I would read an account of one French prisoner in Sachsenhausen “battered to death for taking two carrots from a sheep pen,” and another account of a Frenchman executed after a German’s sandwich went missing. I tried to wrap my head around a world where starving men were killed for stealing food, others broke food rules and were spared, and time in prison was considered a spree.
“You’re really trying to make sense of that?” Aaron’s words felt less like a question and more like an accusation.
I asked Wolfgang if he would go through Daimler’s records once again. Within days, he found a record showing Marcel’s reentry into the Marienfelde camp on February 7, 1944. My heart ached when I realized Marcel had spent Christmas 1943, New Year’s 1944, his Name Day, and his thirty-second birthday in a prison with such a horrific legacy for hate and abuse that when it was demolished, its bricks were ground to dust, then buried.
Frenchmen rallied around fellow citizens when—if—they returned to the labor camp, I read. They pooled money to buy food and help others “get on their feet.” I hoped that happened for Marcel. I hoped the men he befriended embraced him upon his return, and enveloped him with as much kindness and assistance as they could muster. Once again, gratitude swelled for these men I knew only by first names.
To my surprise, Wolfga
ng sent scans of the ledger pages documenting Marcel’s two entries into the Daimler-Marienfelde camp. The records, which began on left-hand pages and continued all the way across the right-hand page, were inscribed in an efficient looping script with smooth black ink. Abbreviations in crimson ink identified each man’s nationality: French, Belgian, Italian, Dutch. The twenty-five vertical lines that created columns filled with names, places, numbers, dates, and departments were like bars of a jail cell. Marienfelde, it seemed, was no different than Spandau Prison.
Left-hand page of two-page ledger showing Marcel’s entry into the camp on January 13, 1943, and his exit on November 11, 1943.
Left-hand page of two-page ledger showing Marcel’s reentry on February 7, 1944. Courtesy: Mercedes-Benz Classic Archives
My heart sank as I realized what one of those numbers reflected. Marcel had been assigned a number. He was worker 210737.
The second ledger page—the one that showed Marcel’s reentry into the camp in February, 1944—did not include an exit date.
“That’s not a surprise,” Aaron said with a shrug. “Everything was chaos at the end. Keeping good records would have been the last of Daimler’s priorities.”
November 11, 1943—the day Marcel had been transferred to Spandau—sounded familiar for another reason, though for weeks I could not figure out why. The date rolled around inside my brain: November 11. November 11. N-o-v-e-m-b-e-r e-l-e-v-e-n-t-h.
Hoover and I were walking around the block when I realized what had been eluding me: November 11 was Vérane’s Name Day. It was a day for celebrations, for gifts, for flowers. But Vérane’s 1943 Name Day had to be a day of shattering heartbreak—that was, if she even knew what happened to her husband eight hundred miles away.
The letter Marcel had written eight days before he was transferred to Spandau did not hint at problems. In fact, it sounded as though he believed he might be heading home soon. I hoped one of the other men had been able to notify Vérane of what had happened. But maybe Marcel had been transferred to Spandau without a word. Maybe, for a desperate two and a half months, Marcel was missing. Absent. Unaccounted for. I could not fathom the worry that must have tormented Vérane as she waited for one of his letters. Letters, I had come to understand, that were not just proof of love. Marcel’s letters were proof of life.
Marcel's Letters Page 9
