Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  The Heinsheimer family store on the Brettener Strasse in Eppingen with Maier and Siegfried in the doorway and Alice on the left in the window above them

  In addition to claims paid to Freiburg’s finance department, Sigmar received notice of heavy taxes withdrawn from his seized accounts to pay Eppingen: Alice’s birthplace had targeted her for inclusion in the fines imposed on its Jewish community for the Kristallnacht destruction of the synagogue there. He was also informed that the Reich would be confiscating the equivalent of 20,000 French francs in exchange for its generously “permitting” him to do business in Mulhouse. According to the Nazi regime, although it operated under a different name (Mesanita) in a foreign country, any business he ran in France should properly be considered an offshoot of the former Günzburger Brothers’ firm, now in the hands of Aryan owners.

  That April, Sigmar wrote to the Freiburg finance authorities outlining arguments seeking reductions. Could the flight tax be deducted from the Jewish wealth tax? Sigmar inquired into the truth of that rumor. A curt reply arrived two days later. “Ein Abzug der Reichsfluchtsteuer an der Judensvermögensabgabe ist nicht zulässig.” A deduction of the flight tax from the Jewish wealth tax is not permitted. Conversely, the city added with contorted logic, the Jewish wealth tax might have been deducted from the flight tax had Sigmar not fled, if he had remained a resident of Germany until after Kristallnacht. But because he had emigrated before January 1, 1939, all taxes would remain unabated. In closing, the letter directed that in case he had further questions, he needed to send return postage if he expected an answer.

  There was nothing for Sigmar to do but file all these papers in the worn leather briefcase where I found them so many years later. Brown by now and frayed at the edges, many of the documents bear the stamp of the Finanzamt with the Nazi insignia of an eagle spreading its wings astride a globe whose center is filled with the swastika’s twisted black cross. They reveal how the finance department changed his name in accord with new regulations—to Samuel Israel Günzburger—to show he was Jewish, while withdrawing so many extra “tax” payments from his accounts even after he fled to Mulhouse that the funds on deposit were entirely depleted.

  In my grandfather’s many replies, I would see signs of the person whose unwavering faith in the difference between right and wrong guided his every transaction. Even in New York at age eighty, he would walk several blocks back to a supermarket on Broadway to return an extra nickel of change, lest the cashier have to pay for the error out of her pocket. In his polished black wingtips, herringbone topcoat, and soft gray fedora, he would slowly make his way back to the store with the deliberateness of a business mogul concluding a matter worth millions. A man who would later rouse himself on his deathbed to remind his grief-stricken wife to pay the rent and the rest of her bills on the first of each month, he never altered the standards he set for himself. Until Kristallnacht, Sigmar had fully believed in the ultimate restoration of justice in the land of his birth, but now optimism gave way to despair.

  Still, Sigmar kept his fears to himself so as not to alarm his traumatized brother about their additional losses in Freiburg or, much worse, about what he now understood to be Hitler’s goal to eliminate German Jewry entirely. Heinrich spent all his days in a chair, staring out a large picture window, totally silent, his eyes fixed on the clock in the parc Salvator behind the apartment. The clock’s face, a circle of color embedded in grass, was made entirely of flowers that were changed with the season. Its hands kissed the fading petals of time as the hours and days passed, the weeks and the months, bringing the world ever closer to war, just twenty years after the last one had ended.

  But Janine did not seem to notice. Much as the plants in the clock lived by their own biological time, unperturbed by the mechanized sweep of the arms that measured their days, so did she—unaffected as yet by the ticking time bomb just over the border—continue to bloom in her own youthful rhythm. Her attention as a teenager was focused on her circle of friends and on a single, special new interest. Having heard Yvette read Roland’s letters aloud all that fall and having seen him in person at Christmas, she was, above all, eager to meet him. Love, like “the light of the heart,” as Balzac described its effect on a provincial young girl, kindled a fresh sense of wonder. The memories are hers.

  One spring afternoon in 1939, as Janine and Yvette strolled after school on the rue du Sauvage, they spotted a group of young men on the corner. “Regarde! C’est lui! Roland! Il est rentré,” Yvette whispered to Janine, indicating the tallest among them. Roland had returned. As the two girls approached, he noticed and stiffened, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as he rested lightly on a long, furled umbrella, in the style that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had made chic for the moment. Unaware that Roland had bitterly learned of her sharing and mocking his letters with friends, Yvette chattered gaily, coquettish, oblivious of his tepid response. But as the two talked, Janine indulged in studying him, as if some glorious mythological being had suddenly alighted to earth in her path. His slim face had high cheekbones and a sensitive mouth, and his velvet brown eyes shone with gentleness. She blushed when he turned and caught her staring at him, like the maiden Psyche stealing forbidden glimpses of the sleeping Cupid, her lover, by candlelight.

  Roland Arcieri, photographed in Mulhouse, 1945 (photo credit 5.3)

  This time, Yvette introduced them, and Roland quickly endeared himself further by praising the very thing that always embarrassed Janine most, so often casting her as an outsider in her own estimation that she tended toward silence. “What a delightful accent you have!” he observed with a beckoning smile. To Janine, it suddenly seemed as if her family’s migration from Freiburg had been uniquely designed to deposit her on that corner in France at that precise moment. It was predestined, she told herself, and she vowed with urgent resolve she had not felt before to do whatever it took to make a permanent place for herself in the life of this man whose poetic expressions of love, although addressed to somebody else, had already managed to win her heart.

  That summer, more than a month before Hitler stunned Europe by announcing a nonaggression pact with the Soviets, storks folded their spindly legs to nest in the bell towers of Mulhouse, red geraniums danced in window boxes, and printers laid patterns of ink on new bolts of cotton fabric, as they had done for centuries. Trudi left on a vacation visit to cousins from Düsseldorf who resettled in Belgium, and Yvette was setting off on holiday too. But she had grown intrigued by Roland once again, her interest whetted by his strange indifference when they met at Easter time, and calculating that he would soon come back from school in Nancy, Yvette bemoaned to her friends that she could not be home to welcome him there.

  “Do me a favor,” Yvette asked Janine, who ever after remembered this conversation that made her feel as sneaky as a thief in the night. “Keep an eye on him for me. Make sure he doesn’t find someone else before I get back to town.”

  When, soon after Yvette’s departure, Roland found Janine, it eased her conscience to think that fate was to blame, as her good fortune in catching his eye began with a game of spin the bottle. Janine and Norbert had just discovered the game at a party earlier that summer and were quick to appreciate the face-saving factors that have long ensured its popularity as a facilitator of first sexual contact: how the random selection of partners for kissing so easily reduces fears of rejection, commitment, baring one’s feelings, or going too far. Still, the challenge remains to hide any reaction as the bottle is spinning and starts to slow down, to prevent lips from moving in silent entreaties for it to point to the person one would choose on one’s own, if given the chance and adequate nerve.

  For Janine the air hummed, and the walls themselves started turning when Roland Arcieri sauntered into the room, and with a smile and a half wave to them all, pulled up a chair. At nineteen, he was a few years older than the others, and he took in the scene with bemused detachment that left them to wonder whether he’d deign to join in the fun. It w
as then, however, that he spotted Janine and recalled having met her before on the street with Yvette. “Ah, midi moins dix,” he said under his breath, remembering the way that she stood a little bit tilted, at an angle that faintly suggested a clock’s minute hand at ten minutes to noon. Had he noticed then how pretty she was?

  She was tall and slender with auburn hair that curled to her shoulders, no longer restrained by Fräulein Elfriede’s insistence on neat chin-length bobs. Her light blue eyes were large and wide set, and the near-level curve of her brows lent her an innocent air of serious purpose. Her nose was straight, not small or large; her skin clear and lovely. To the extent she would have changed any feature, she would have preferred a more generous mouth, and so she lightly enhanced it with lipstick, which carried the risk of her father’s displeasure. Now she realized Roland was looking her over and forced herself to return his regard, bravely meeting and holding his eyes.

  “Come on, Roland! It’s your turn,” someone shouted to general approval until Roland started laughing, stood up, stubbed out his cigarette, and then, with a playful wink at Janine, agreed to take his chance with the bottle. Her heart was pounding. How could she stand to watch him kiss someone else! What to do if the bottle landed on her? Oh, if only she could have escaped on a pretext, but leaving now might well be construed as insulting to him.

  Roland bent down on one knee to spin the empty wine bottle, a roulette wheel of kisses that held everyone rapt. Living inside each fragile rotation of the flashing green glass, Janine became as one with the bottle, round and round until she felt dizzy, turning and wobbling, directing its outcome through prayer and will. The bottle skittered sideways, clattering on the uneven planks of the floor, hit a chair leg, then slowed down and stopped moving, pointing closely enough in Janine’s direction for Roland to select her. The archer’s aim had been perfect; Cupid himself could not have done better.

  Janine looked up and studied his face for signs of dismay or derision she hoped not to find. Surely, she worried, he would have preferred the bottle to land on one of the girls he had known so much longer! Nervously clutching the edge of her seat as he approached, she tried to ignore the rest of them staring. The warmth in her cheeks told her they had gone pink, and to hide them she reached down to yank up her white ankle socks and then kept pulling at them, her chin grazing her lap, as if she might draw the short socks straight over her head. At the very same time, she regretted not having worn something more alluring than her old floral-print dress with its childish puffed sleeves and high ruffled collar. At least she had added a blue ribbon belt to gather the waist, which helped to show off her figure a little.

  Then he was waiting, grinning, in front of her chair, and he reached for her hands. She stood just before him, and his eyes smiled deeply into her own. And when he kissed her right there in front of them all, it was no schoolboy’s peck on the cheek or anything like her mother’s too-noisy and brusquely self-conscious smack in the air. His wide mouth was firm as his lips met her own, and like an explorer planting a stake in new soil, he claimed her right then for the rest of her days, and she responded with all the need and desire, the yearning for closeness that she had stifled as long as she could remember. There was only Roland and this kiss that transformed her.

  The room had grown silent, all of them gaping, then suddenly the others started to cheer. “So that’s what you learned in college!” one of the boys snickered, breaking the general tension with laughter. “Well, now it’s your turn, Pierrot,” another proposed. But for Roland and Janine, still standing together, the game was over. Janine felt her heart racing and her face glowing red as she sank back into her chair, mostly determined not to glance in Norbert’s direction. She could feel him studying her and sensed disapproval, the rules he set for his sisters not the same ones he imposed on himself. With a stab of guilt—her chief aim in the past having been pleasing Alice and Sigmar—she realized she would have to find some way of bribing her brother never to tell her parents what happened.

  Was it that kiss that later made my mother so wary that I might too soon discover how souls can meld when lips touch lips? Was it the pain of loving but losing Roland that seemed to make her so intensely protective that the significance she placed on a kiss exploded past reason or my understanding? When I reached the age of going to parties or later on dates, she would always sit waiting until I returned, and there was no disguising the time when the antique French chinoiserie clock on the wall outside her room ceased its regular tick for a moment, pregnantly hiccupped, and then chimed the hour.

  The first question Mom asked was always the same. “Did he try to kiss you good night?” she would probe in a tone of concern. I’d find her reading in bed or on the steps, smoking or filing her long, Revlonred nails, depending on whether my father had gone to sleep yet. My mother looked straight in my eyes and studied my face every time to determine whether a kiss—either empty and careless or pulsing with feeling beyond all forgetting—had affected me in some permanent fashion.

  “You can’t let someone kiss you too soon,” she would lecture, her own youthful romance tucked away in the past at those moments. “He won’t respect you. You’ll get a bad reputation because he’ll tell all his friends.…”

  What did I know at that point of my mother’s time with Roland in Mulhouse? I had heard of their regular meetings on the rue du Sauvage, sharing pastries and talking, playing volleyball and swimming in the Ill River where the young people’s sports club gathered that summer, with Hitler growling just over the border, preparing shortly to pounce upon Poland. An infrequent daytime movie, she said, some hiking, a bike ride, hours in the bookshops, poetry, talking. Much later, however, standing with her on an unseasonably chilly May day on a bridge overlooking the same Alsatian river, swollen with silt and heavy spring rain, other memories revealed why he was the one she had never forgotten. With Roland, her introduction to the opposite sex had been exceedingly tender and loving. What she found in his arms was a goal in itself—shelter from all the ugly turmoil swirling around them. As the threat of war grew closer each day, they seemed to exist, wearing blinders, in a world of their own.

  Friday, September 1, 1939, four days before Janine’s sixteenth birthday, she and Roland lay hidden in a cradle of moist brown earth on the banks of the Ill, with the tall silver grasses that served as their curtain tickling their legs. A light wind rustled the leaves of the willows, and ducks flew over their heads to land on the water and float downstream in pairs. Roland and Janine were wet from a swim, and Roland, slim and bronzed by the sun, rested his weight on one elbow as he smoothed back her hair from her brow and bent down to kiss her. His hand gently stroked her neck and her shoulders and his fingers traced the damp edge of the yellow wool bathing suit her mother had bought her, just a girl-child, the previous summer before leaving Freiburg. Then he lowered his head to place a single warm kiss in the hollow of her throat, a place so soft and private it startled them both. “Quelle beauté,” he murmured, his voice a caress, his cheek against hers, as both of them struggled for breath—shyly, discreetly—still clasping each other.

  An hour later, after biking back home and dashing upstairs to the apartment where she knew her parents would be beginning to worry—ready to light Sabbath candles and sit down to their ritual dinner of barley soup and beef flanken—she was instantly struck by the heavy silence. Alice and Sigmar sat there not speaking, and the table had not yet been set. They barely looked up as she came through the door, and she was shocked that her mother was crying, a crumpled linen handkerchief from her trousseau, A.G. finely embroidered on one of its corners, balled up in her hand.

  So they knew, she thought, oddly calm in that instant. Someone must have spied her with Roland at the river, she imagined, and rushed to offer her parents a detailed report. She wondered whether her parents would read even more on her face—a new fire in her eyes or a blush on her cheek. Yet steeled this once by unpracticed defiance, she was unwilling to diminish or dirty her memory of that
afternoon with some awkward attempt to explain it away or to accept any censure for having done wrong. In her mind’s eye, she summoned the people they had seen at the river and tied the odious Klapperstein around all their necks in a phantom parade of staggering figures, and she tried to guess who might have betrayed her.

  It was then that she noticed the suitcases lining the hallway, a map spread out in front of her father, and the headlines of the evening paper that still lay on the table screaming the news. Hitler’s army had overrun Poland, while his warplanes and tanks attacked Polish troops, cities, bridges, and railroads. In a world-changing Blitzkrieg of fire and terror, the Germans rained death and destruction on Poland, even as she and Roland had lain in the long summer grasses. In response to the invasion of Poland, she read, France and England had warned that unless Hitler withdrew, treaty obligations would impel them to war.

  Janine stared at the web of roads on the map spread out on the table and at the suitcases lined up like some ragtag army, ready to march, crookedly running the length of the hall. Her father was talking, looking at her. War. Too close to the border here in Alsace. Hitler invading. She heard only fragments of what he was saying, but sensed everything starting to topple around her. Her mind rushed back to Roland, to the green, lazy river, as if, starting over, she could take a different route home in order to enter a happier scene when she came through the door. She remembered the distant day she had outraged her father by sharing the bold theological news that it wasn’t really for eating an apple that Adam and Eve were exiled from Eden, but rather for their sexual exploits. Having only just left the arms of Roland, was she, too, now to be punished for trading kisses and indulging in love? Wir wandern aus. Again. But where could they go?