“Uhh, non. It’s a long story, but . . . un nom d’hôtel, s’il vous plait?” he said half in English.
“Hôtel Bonnes Nouvelles. 17 rue Beauregard.” The waitress scribbled it down on a napkin and handed it to him. “Near de Louvre, Rive Droite.” She left him with a quizzical smile.
Rudiger and my father took the métro from Gare du Nord to rue Strasbourg-Saint Denis and asked for directions. Around the corner, they found the hotel neatly tucked away on a side street. The Bonnes Nouvelles was little, old, non-requisitioned, and very French—but clean enough. It was perfect. He checked in.
His room was small and simply furnished. He dropped his bags and quickly changed into a clean uniform. To complete his look, he donned an olive-colored tie, cap, gloves, and a white scarf. Then he slipped his US insignia into his pocket and grabbed his camera as an afterthought. When he came downstairs again, Rudiger was waiting by the door. The weather had completely cleared, and Paris felt like spring. They took the métro to the Etoile. Again he had a feeling of déjà vu. Everything, including the names of the stations, seemed familiar. They arrived at the Arc de Triomphe, saluted the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and continued along the Champs-Élysées.
They ate and drank their way through the city that December day, strolling along the Champs-Élysées as though it were May instead of a few days before Christmas. With the exception of cafés and cinemas, everything was closed, but through the windows my father noticed how well stocked the shelves were. Before long, they stopped at the Lido Café, home to an American mess with excellent service and fantastic food prepared by the French.
Champs-Élysées, Paris, December 1945.
“After we finish here, there’s a shop I want to visit. I released a man several months ago who made me promise that when I came to Paris I would go to his wife’s glove store so she could give me a pair as a gift for my mother. He had been a POW in German hands for five years before he came to me for interrogation. I let him go. He was a lone Jew in a crowd of surrendered soldiers.”
“Where is it?” asked Rudiger.
“In the Lido Arcade. It should be right over here. We can duck in; it should only take a few minutes.”
The glass canopy captured the winter light, enriching the colors in the mosaic floor. The arcade was reminiscent of another time and was untouched by the war. They found Mme. Payen’s little storefront. Closed. How unfortunate that she would not reopen until the next afternoon at one. They left and walked again along the Champs-Élysées, following de Gaulle’s footsteps through a liberated Paris. They turned down Rue Saint-Honoré, passing La Madeleine. I wonder if my father was aware that below the Greek architectural wonder of a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene stood the footprint of a synagogue from the twelfth century? During the first expulsion of the Jews from Paris, the synagogue was confiscated by the bishop. Continuing down Boulevard des Capucines, they finally stopped for a digestif at Café de la Paix, just as any tourist should. A strange silence permeated the city on that day, which my father couldn’t quite justify until he realized that the noticeable lack of soldiers throughout Paris was creating a rather beautiful quietude. It gave the city a sense of normalcy that he had not experienced in years.
“Here’s a table with a rather lovely view, soldier,” said my father.
“Of the Opéra or of our neighbor?” asked Rudiger, whispering out of the side of his mouth. Their evening began with a cigarette and ended with a Pernod long after my father and the neighbor, Gina, accompanied him back to the métro to catch his train.
He wanted to arrive in Brussels that evening to proceed to Rotterdam the next day. Gina (my acquisition from the Café de la Paix) suggested that we go to Clichy, where the prices are more acceptable—which we did, by métro. We wasted no time. . . . Eventually, we went to a little restaurant—typical of the small restaurants we know so well. The meal and the price were excellent. . . . Following the meal we went to Bal Musette—which was really fun. All sorts of dancers—rather chic couples. There were two Americans there, myself and one other. While there I also put on my US insignia, because no one, including Gina, wanted to believe I was an American. We stayed until closing—Gina was crazy for dancing.
Afterward, they left the narrow street of bals musettes on Rue de Lappe and walked along Boulevard Beaumarchais for a while, enjoying the warmth of their night together. As dawn broke over the City of Lights, they parted. He had done everything he could do in one day. Back at his little room in the Bonne Nouvelle, he slept for a few hours and woke at 7:30. As he pulled himself together, he tuned the dial to Radio Monte Carlo just in time to hear Rina Ketty crooning one of his favorite songs, “J’Attendrai” (I’ll Wait). On his way back to the Gare du Nord, he captured the calm of the liberated city in black and white. In one unforgettable day, Paris had left her mark on him. He was certain he would return some day.23
* Military Intelligence Service.
* My aunt’s formal name was Meta. Meti must have been a nickname.
* Louis H. Sobel, assistant executive secretary of the JDC.
CHAPTER 10
“I Found Your Gold Bally Shoes”
Irwin Shaw once wrote: “When we look back into the past, we recognize a moment in time which was decisive, at which the pattern of our lives changed, a moment at which we moved irrevocably off in a new direction. The change may be a result of planning or accident; we may leave happiness or ruins behind us and advance to a different happiness or more thorough ruin; but there is no going back. The moment may be just that, a second in which a wheel is turned, a look exchanged, a sentence spoken—or it may be a long afternoon, a week, a season, during which the issue is in doubt, in which the wheel is turned a hundred times, the small accumulated accidents permitted to happen.”
While slaying his dragon, my father confronted the terror he faced during the war years. Throughout his odyssey he encountered a thousand heroes with a thousand unforgettable faces, while witnessing the violence and death visited on countless people who were lost during the Shoah. He knew what a miracle it was to be alive.
And so it was that on December 17, 1945, he finally boarded the 12:30 express from Gare du Nord to Brussels and returned to the only place he had ever called home. Two cigarettes and a bit of kidding around bought my father a spot in first class. He spent most of the trip chatting with his neighbor, a banker from Ghent. In 1940, just days after his own family’s escape, Ghent was trapped in the pincers of the German advance toward France. Hand-to-hand combat broke out on its streets,24 and the city was caught in the midst of one of the world’s largest battles. As the Allies ferociously defended control of the English Channel, the fighting was so fierce that neither army could restrain its firing, which resulted in massive civilian casualties. When the train pulled into Gare du Nord, my father bid the banker farewell and rushed through the great hall of the old railway station toward the exit. A few hours earlier, while he was on his way to Brussels, Aunt Ellen was celebrating her twenty-fourth birthday on West 79th Street, while on the East Side of Manhattan a bugler was warming up to play Taps during the first tree lighting ceremony on Park Avenue. As soon as the trumpeter blew his last note, Boy Scouts were to light memorial bulbs in what has become an annual ritual dedicated to the supreme sacrifice of our fallen servicemen.
Returning to a city scarred by war and occupation, he was eager to discover what remained of their old lives, if anything was left to be found. Once outside the station, he stopped and held Brussels in his embrace for a moment before hailing a cab.
Coming full circle, my father arrives at Rue de la Loi, Brussels, in December 1945.
“La Residence, 155 Rue de la Loi.”
He fell back against the seat as the taxi pulled away. He lit his pipe. The suspense was too much to bear. Before another moment passed, he leaned forward to look out of the window. He rolled down the glass just enough to sniff the cold, familiar air. He couldn’t help it, he smelled everything, always. To his surprise, Brussels had barely
changed. Cars were rolling, trams were functioning. At first glance in the dim light of the late December evening, the buildings around the station appeared to have suffered no harm. The window across the street at Le Bon Marché was full of merchandise. They passed the department store L’Innovation. Boulevard Anspach was busy. The city was alive. From the corner of his eye he spotted La Coupe Glacée, his favorite ice cream shop. As they passed Chez Mayol, he saw an enormous bunch of grapes cascading from a basket like a waterfall. Delicacies would have to wait a little while longer. He snapped photos along the way. The last time he saw his building was as he craned his neck from the backseat of their crowded car while his father sped away. All he could see from that painful angle was the enormous geometric blur of one of Brussels’ most imposing buildings fading into obscurity as they drove through the normally busy artery of the city. Just a few short days later Hitler dropped his bombs.
Remarkably, nothing appeared to have changed. La Résidence Palace was just as he remembered it. He was all about the business of the moment and curtailed his emotion, but one thing is certain: when a child loses his home, he loses his sense of place and along with that a formative part of his young identity. My father had lost his anchor that awful day of May1940. When the German army occupied the city, they forcibly evicted the remaining tenants to requisition the building, and the home from which my family escaped on Rue de la Loi became Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe headquarters and residences. Ironically, the château where they lived for the first six weeks after they escaped from Brussels also became headquarters for the Wehrmacht. They were caught in Hitler’s crosshairs from the start, but they somehow were not captured. They escaped from Germany to Strasbourg, then to Belgium before fleeing to France in a hailstorm of bombs and gunfire. As with many other German Jews, they put their trust in the two countries that fell the fastest and collaborated most willingly with the Reich and its plans for the Final Solution. I am positive that this was not lost on my father once he became aware of just how close they had come to a different fate.
Information about the building’s use during the occupation has either been buried or lost. The Belgian government recently destroyed documents relating to that period, and no amount of research uncovered anything different than the following description pieced together from Wikipedia and the latest brochure describing the history of 155 and an architect’s plans for transforming it into the architectural centerpiece of the European Union.
Following the end of the First World War, Walloon businessman Lucien Kaisin planned the building to be a luxurious apartment block for the bourgeoisie and aristocracy of Brussels in response to the housing shortage caused by the war. He also expected to address the shortage of domestic workers at the time, by providing housing and making the domestics available to all residents. The complex of buildings, which were designed by Swiss architect Michel Polak, was created to be a small town within a city. It was divided into ten sections with a total of 180 apartments of varying sizes and contained amenities such as hot and cold running water, central heating, and electricity. The Art Deco building included a theater hall, a swimming pool, an indoor tennis court, a barber shop, and other commercial services such as two restaurants, a conference room, a bank with safety deposit boxes, a post office, and small luxury shops. It was a prestigious housing collective for the most privileged layers of society. Its commercial success was short-lived, though, because of its requisitioning in 1940 as headquarters of the occupying German army. In September of 1944, the day after the liberation of Brussels, the building was taken over as headquarters for SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) and RAF (Royal Air Force) Second Tactical Air Force.
When I think of 155 in all of its grandeur, I think of it as my grandparents’ home; a place where, if things had been different, I would have visited on Sunday afternoons for tea instead of visiting my Omi in her Park Royal Hotel suite on West 73rd Street, where she spent the remainder of her days sitting quietly in her chair comforted by her elegant blue bathrobe. She was like a grieving widow who never parts with the memory of her lost love. The three keys on the old key ring that I found at the bottom of her alligator bag opened the door to her home in her former life. In the forty or so years that she lived in New York, my grandmother never lived in a proper home again; she lived in a residential hotel because, as my mother confirmed, she lost her faith when she had to leave every home she ever knew. All that is left of those days, besides her set of keys, are a few remaining odds and ends and my father’s chronicle written on his return: an objective account of belongings found and what transpired at the building during their absence. He slowly and methodically takes us on a tour of his lost city, and brings to my grandparents and aunt a part of their life no longer within their grasp. They never returned.
My father paid the cabbie, then looked up and around for a moment, taking stock while he adjusted his cap. He fixed his tie, picked up his bag. With measured steps, he began what felt like a slow walk to the building’s main entrance. To the guard positioned at the entry he said, “Pardon me, sir, but I used to live here.”
The Canadian soldier stood firm and would not let him through. As the building was now British headquarters, my father had no choice but to find a hotel for the night and come back in the morning. He waited at the curb for another taxi. He decided where to go.
“Le Savoy.”
They drove toward the hotel, and as they approached, he could see evidence of the bombing. The street suddenly ended. The hotel was the last building standing. After that was a rather large pit where a good-size river could run through, dividing the Botanical Gardens in two. He whistled through the side of his mouth and said in French to the driver, “That’s the first damage that I’ve seen.”
“Ehh-heh, I’ll take you around a bit on the way to your hotel, monsieur. The Boches SS tried to burn down the Palace of Justice before their hasty retreat last year. There is no longer a cupola. The fire lasted more than twelve hours, the cupola melted. Now, if you did not know it was there before, well, you will see, you will hardly be able to tell.”
They continued on. My father saw Brussels with her gloves off. The Shell building had windows blown out and had been requisitioned by the Americans as the CHANOR Base Section. My father lit a cigarette and asked the driver while he exhaled, “Tell me, how is the press here? I’ve just come from Paris.”
155 Rue de la Loi, Brussels.
“Oh, compared to Paris, Bruxelle’s is excellent! We still have Le Soir, which is pretty good as usual, La Dernière Heure, La Libre Belgique, which is very good, several Leftist and Catholic papers, plus the noontime Paris-Soir imitations. From these, my friend, you can tell what the prevailing conditions are here. How was Paris?”
They talked and drove through the city, dodging people, bikes, and trams until they reached the Savoy. The cabbie waited while my father inquired about a room. No luck. He climbed back in to the car.
“Requisitioned by the Canadians. Hotel Métropole, s’il vous plaît. Place de Brouckere.”
“Except for that fire and the big crater near the gardens, we would have fared pretty well. So you’re an Americain? But your accent, c’est impossible.”
“Yes, I lived here before the war. We left before the bombs dropped. In fact, we were in Dunkirk having dinner when the first ones fell.”
“Ahh, okay. I wasn’t so lucky. I was here for the duration. It was very hard. Leopold was a coward to leave us to the Boches. A king who abandons his people! Please let me drive you around and show you a bit more of the city. I’ll give you a tour then, the longer way to Brouckere.”
He checked in at the Métropole. The next morning he went straight back to Rue de la Loi and the guard let him in. Near the door he saw a familiar face. An old man wearing a black Hamburg hat and a black coat, with a decoration on his lapel. The war had not been kind to him. The man had aged. My father approached him and said to him in French, “Are you M. Huber?”
He answered, “Y
es I am, and what about it?”
As my father identified himself, M. Huber’s eyes changed. They hardened with recognition. He responded very curtly, “I thought you all dead, because you never gave me any sign that you were alive.”
Watching this exchange was another man. My father had his name on the tip of his tongue, when from behind him emerged a fat woman of a certain age, with a mop and bucket—that she almost dropped. She recognized him immediately. She began repeating, “And I can still see him in front of me, such a nice little boy, and look at him now, an officer in the American army! Ah, you know, I often said to Jeanne, whatever happened to Madame Wolff, her children, and Monsieur Wolff ?! I can still see him in front of me, look at him!”
When the excitement of the moment passed, my father calmly asked Monsieur Huber the whereabouts of his belongings, full well knowing that finding anything was as unlikely as his own return. He immediately asked that anything remaining be handed over to him as he had sole power of attorney. A still-hardened Huber brushed him off and explained that a certain Monsieur Weiss would have to give him permission on behalf of his parents. Right about then, my father, feeling increasingly frustrated, wanted a word or two with his own father. If only he hadn’t given Weiss permission to intervene during their absence, there would be no issue. He would either have to convince Huber or find Weiss, but someone had to trust him. Now. How could this possibly be so complicated? He was obviously who he declared himself to be, and considering the incredible extenuating circumstances, surely there should no problem. Finally, after my father calmly explained to Monsieur Huber that he would do anything he asked, that time was truly of the essence, and that his parents now lived in New York, Monsieur Huber relented as suddenly as he had dismissed him. He began to open up and tell my father the lengths to which he and others had gone to safeguard the Wolff’s possessions.
Someday You Will Understand Page 25
