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

by Leslie Maitland

  The German attack, moreover, came as France was already struggling to cope with a massive refugee problem. Defeat in the Spanish Civil War the previous year chased more than four hundred thousand Spaniards and disheartened volunteers from other countries over the border. The French interned many under inhumane conditions in camps like Gurs constructed along the Spanish frontier. Now, from the east, millions of new refugees surged through the country ahead of the German advance. In panic, German Jews, Poles, Belgians, Dutch, and Luxembourgers jammed the roads, overwhelming the French ability to deal with them while simultaneously fighting to hold back Hitler’s armies. The refugees—many of them stateless, impoverished, unable to speak French—helped fan the xenophobia already in place. And as half the 350,000 Jews living in France when the Germans invaded were recent arrivals, their numbers were viewed with mounting dismay.

  By June 10, as the Nazi war machine continued its overwhelming drive across France, and as Italy, lusting for plunder, joined the struggle on Hitler’s side, the French government fled to Bordeaux from Paris, leaving the capital an “open city” for the victorious Germans to enter without firing a shot. On June 14, the swastika flew on the Eiffel Tower’s exquisite iron lattice. German soldiers goose-stepped under the Arc de Triomphe and toasted their victory on the Champs-Elysées. Less than a third of the three million residents of central Paris were still there, the rest having joined the terrified masses—comprising almost a quarter of the native French population of forty million—swelling the roads as they fled from their homes.

  For the demoralized French Army, confronting civilian panic on so large a scale further disrupted their efforts to impede the merciless German assault. Many soldiers threw down their guns and simply deserted. Other divisions barely could move, wedged in place by the aimless masses searching for safety. By the thousands, the fleeing French poured into Gray from the north, crossed its Stone Bridge over the Saône, and headed toward Dole. With German troops ready to storm the town, Alice and Marie, desperate with fear, realized the time had come to join the exodus scrambling to run—farther west, farther south. They could not risk waiting for Sigmar’s return.

  Nine months after the family’s arrival in Gray, in the face of dwindling public transportation, the Rosengart still sat parked on the street with no one to drive it. Aunt Marie had repeatedly urged Janine and Trudi to learn to drive, but after only two lessons they gave up, both preferring to spend their time with the Eclaireuses or French Girl Scouts, rolling bandages for the army. The sisters jumped at the chance of being included when Mayor Lévy’s granddaughter asked them to join, and they felt proud to help fight the Nazis. Besides, the small car regularly stalled, and they were embarrassed to have to climb out and crank it; and as neither Sigmar nor Alice knew how to drive, the girls saw no reason why they should, either.

  Now, having no other recourse, trying to imagine what Sigmar would do to escape from Gray, Alice sought out Monsieur Fimbel. The plan devised by Marie—counting on her daughter-in-law’s resourcefulness to save them—involved meeting up with Lisette and her children in Arnay-le-Duc in Burgundy and then for them all to flee south together. Monsieur Fimbel agreed to take them that far, but said he would have to rush right back to Gray to be at the helm of his school when the Germans invaded. There was no time to tarry! He would drive Alice, Marie, and Bella in his own car and recruit one of his teachers to drive the Rosengart with Janine and Trudi. Assuming there was gasoline to be had, he counseled, they would undoubtedly find some other refugee in Arnay-le-Duc more than willing to serve as their driver. At worst, down the road, the car being valuable, they could use it to barter for other assistance.

  The five women packed a small suitcase each and closed their door on everything else. Before leaving, Alice paused to write Sigmar a note in the event he escaped from Langres and got back to Gray before she did:

  Lieber Sigmar, We are going with Marie and Bella to join Lisette in Arnay-le-Duc and hopefully will move south from there. God willing, we will try to come back here as soon as we can. I beg of you, please take care of yourself! Gruß und Kuß. Greetings and Kisses, Your Lisel

  The next few days’ travels made the trip from Mulhouse to Gray when war was declared the previous fall seem like a casual family outing. Their first stop, Arnay-le-Duc, northwest of Beaune, was a trip of just a few hours, which they made on back roads to avoid running into German divisions. They arrived to bedlam in the historic main square, filled with soldiers and refugees all in confusion and terror over what to do next. But in the midst of the crowd they found Lisette, who had shrewdly sized up the situation and instantly grasped that under the circumstances, it was chacun pour soi, each for oneself, and they had to be sharp to seize the advantage.

  A fleet of empty ambulances was just preparing to pull out of the city under the escort of the retreating French Army. The best possible plan now, Lisette advised quietly, was for Marie, Bella, Alice, Janine, and Trudi to wangle a ride to safety with the ambulance corps. Meanwhile, she and her four children would seek cover at a farm owned by the parents of their governess in Brive-la-Gaillarde, if only she could think of a way to get there. When her eye fell on the Rosengart, Lisette asked Alice to lend her the car and began searching the square for a fresh volunteer to take the wheel. In her arms she struggled to carry Françoise, her disabled eight-year-old daughter, while her other twin daughter and two sons, then four and two years old, clung to the skirt of the governess who trailed behind her. Running to the French general in command, Lisette permitted herself to break into tears. She summoned every bit of helpless allure as she begged for compassion, pointing first to the group of women from Gray who stood self-effacingly off to the side; then at the children hiding behind her; and finally at the shiny, red Rosengart, still barely driven. The others watched in wide-eyed amazement as the general gave her his total attention, even sympathetically nodding at points.

  Then he smiled, patted her cheek, shouted the name of a soldier, and instructed Lisette to load her children into the car. With the governess in front and the four children crowded in back, the soldier leaped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Before Lisette understood what he was doing, the soldier saluted and roared off down the road without saying a word. Lisette, Marie, and the others stood staring in shock.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Marie asked, as her daughter-in-law peered into the distance as if she expected the car to turn around and come back. But the general was suddenly there at her side. “I have children of my own, you know,” he said. “Now take the rest of your family and get into that ambulance there.” He jerked his head toward one of the vans—a big red cross painted on its roof—then turned to muster his men for departure. “We’re getting ready to pull out. Hurry up now.”

  Lisette stood gaping into the distance, unable to move. Then she jumped to life and turned to Marie. “Get in, go with them,” she ordered her mother-in-law and her entourage, herding them toward the ambulance. “I’m going to get my bicycle and go after the children, and if I have to pedal all the way to the Mediterranean, I’m going to find them. I’ll get word to you later.” And with that, Lisette disappeared.

  Over the next two days, the women jolted on wooden benches that ran along the sides of the ambulance in a convoy that crawled down a road clogged by everything that could move or be moved. With all of France now on the run from the German offensive, the roads to the south were choked. Everyone thought they’d be safer the farther they went and that the countryside would be safer than cities. It was almost as if with the Boches advancing, the entire French population would claw its way over rocky frontiers or hurl itself howling into the ocean.

  Sigmar’s sister, Marie Günzburger Cahen, mother of Edy and Mimi

  The pace was numbing, progress measured in feet as the long convoy of new ambulances wound through the terrified throng of people on foot and packed into cars that were piled high with belongings; people on horses and wagons, pushing carts and carriages, leading cows, g
oats, sheep, and chickens, or stumbling under the weight of bulging valises. Some of the aged or ill were ferried in wheelbarrows or wheelchairs. Frenzied couples darted everywhere, trying to keep their children together. Hysterical parents stood at the roadside in tears, shouting for children adrift in the mayhem. For months thereafter, newspapers would run long daily columns of classified ads alerting family members where to find one another, many thousands having been separated at the stations while they fought to board trains or having lost track of each other along tumultuous roads.

  Despite Europe already in tatters, millions behaved as though they believed that there was still somewhere to go beyond Hitler’s reaches. Mattresses were stacked atop cars as if they could offer protection from dive-bombing Stukas that plunged, sirens screaming, with swastikas riding their tail fins at ninety-degree angles straight to the earth. Waves of these bombers strafed the fields and the roads, defiling the air with smoke and fire and the shrieks of the fearful and the cries of the wounded.

  With a deafening wail, warplanes streaked toward the ambulance carrying the Günzburger women. The driver slammed on his brakes and ran to the back to throw open the doors. He half pulled his five passengers out of the van, shoved them beneath it, and scrambled beside them for shelter, mumbling prayers. Marie cried out in pain, not hit but bruised, as she fell forward on top of a stone. German machine guns nipped the length of the road, before the planes rose and veered off toward more valuable sites to deposit their deadly four thousand-pound payloads.

  Moving on, the ambulance fleet wove through small towns, greeted in one by jubilant news that the United States had entered the war. The townspeople were laughing and crying, singing and dancing and throwing flowers at the convoy, but all too soon the rumor turned out to be false. While newspapers were not to be found, improbable stories were passed down the line, and the women had no way of knowing what to believe. That Hitler was dead or that the Reich had already seized Britain? That the pope had taken his life, or that the Russians had entered the war and were bombing Berlin? A peace treaty, some insisted, was about to be signed! For those on the road, as for those in the towns whose radios offered only music, no news, an accurate state of the moment could not be discerned. Terror reigned where knowledge was wanting.

  After sunset, the ambulance fleet and the soldiers pulled into a schoolyard to wait out the night. Spotting Janine, the general sent her to fetch water so he could shave. As the hours ticked by, punctuated by the staccato thud of bombs in the distance, the women tried to ignore their hunger and find rest on the ambulance benches. Through its windows, they watched the black bowl of the night lit by explosions along the horizon. In darkness, the van was filled with the sounds of Marie groaning in pain. There was no way to help her, but Alice understood that Sigmar’s sister must have broken some ribs as she dove under the ambulance during the air raids.

  The next afternoon, when the convoy rolled into Vichy, a fashionable spa town on the Allier River near the center of France, Marie was clutching her side and flatly refused to continue. She took in the sight of countless exhausted travelers sleeping all over the parks and under the city’s covered arcades amid their belongings and declared that, if need be, she was ready to join them in making her bed on the street. Hotel rooms were doubtless scarce, the stores and banks all were closed, the trains had stopped running, and the ambulance convoy was planning to leave, but Marie would not budge, which left Alice no choice.

  “Vous êtes folles, les Boches arrivent!” You’re all crazy, the Krauts are coming! the young driver exclaimed, waving his arms back toward the road as if he could already spot them advancing. He shook his head in disbelief as he handed down the valises to Janine and Trudi, who did not disagree. While the three older women collapsed in a park, the sisters searched for someplace to stay and were grateful to find two rooms in a run-down hotel. Alice put Marie into bed and then announced her intention, in keeping with strict regulations pertaining to their refugee status in France, to register their arrival in Vichy, along with the address where they were staying. The girls could hardly believe they had heard her correctly. Register here, register now in the French city hall? As Germans in France with the Wehrmacht invading? As Jews on the run from the Nazis with the Germans advancing? The idea was preposterous and, surprising herself by confronting her mother, Janine openly argued against it. Registering now was more dangerous than breaking the law, she maintained, but even at this moment of crisis, Alice could not be dissuaded from fulfilling what was expected of her.

  “We don’t even know how long we’ll be staying. Let’s wait a few days,” Janine persisted.

  “Sei nicht so frech!” Alice burst back with a warning glare, unaccustomed to Janine’s being so cheeky. Janine fell silent. But as Alice marched off to find city hall, Janine caught up and linked her arm through her mother’s. She distrusted the wisdom of where they were going, but could not help looking around her with interest. Under normal circumstances, visiting Vichy would have been an adventure. Indeed, even now, after months of seclusion in the stillness of Gray, she marveled at this bustling resort with its elaborate architecture—the Grand Casino, the Opéra, and the lavish hotels near the triangular parc des Sources, where, since the times of the Caesars, well-heeled, health-conscious tourists had flocked to the restorative waters of twelve thermal springs. But any semblance of Vichy’s glamour was lost that night when—drawn to the windows of their hotel rooms by the overbright lights and thundering roar of invasion—the women watched German panzers roll down the street and over manicured gardens, mowing down flowers and trees and anything else that lay in their path.

  By morning, all was changed: German troops filled the streets and red-and-black Nazi banners flew from city hall where Alice and Janine had registered the previous day. When Janine left the hotel, unthinkingly heading to mail a letter to a friend back in Gray, she stopped short at the sight of German soldiers grabbing refugees off the sidewalks and loading them onto a large open truck. She heard people crying and watched in horror as a soldier beat an old, bearded man until he toppled, bleeding, into the gutter. The man’s arms pitifully flailed as he tried to ward off the soldier’s kicks, but again and again, the booted foot slammed into him until he stopped moving.

  “Stehen Sie auf, Sie jüdisches Schwein!” the soldier shouted, yanking the man’s limp body up toward the truck. Janine could not associate this terrible scene to any human behavior she had witnessed before. She remembered Uncle Heinrich’s condition on returning from Dachau after Kristallnacht, and she was stunned by a new apprehension of the dangers they faced. What would happen to Sigmar when German soldiers broke down the gates of the prison in Langres and discovered him there?

  Janine’s heartbeat was drumming so fast and loud in her ears she thought the soldiers might hear it as she remembered her mother’s candid responses to the registry’s questions about where they had come from and where they were staying. Under her breath, she cursed Alice’s slavish adherence to law, as she rushed back to warn her mother and aunt that they had to move out right away for fear that the Germans, tracking down registered Jews, would search their hotel. With that, the relationship between mother and daughter shifted irrevocably. From then on, Janine realized, her mother would always require her children’s protection and guidance. A month away from her forty-eighth birthday, ripped from her country and language and now also her husband, Alice was lost.

  That night the women slept in a hat shop next to the railroad. Marie remembered the owner as a man who had worked for her husband in Mulhouse before moving to Vichy. The milliner was Jewish, and he agreed to lend them money and provide them shelter for a few days while they tried to find other housing that would not require them to present passports. It proved a curious but welcome respite as Janine tried to blot out the scene of the vicious beating she had watched in the street. Willfully, she forced it out of her mind, and with practice, she would make it a habit to steer her thinking away from things that upset her. She would hid
e the bad thoughts away behind doors in her mind with so much success she could later forget they ever were there.

  She was aided that night by a happy distraction. While Alice and Marie stretched out to sleep on top of the counters and Bella dozed in a chair, the two sisters amused themselves by trying on hats in front of the mirrors. Bypassing feathers and ribbons and velvets with veils, they preened for each other in mannish dark felt fedoras, trying to emulate Marlene Dietrich. Janine’s favorite hat, unpurchased but never forgotten, was a deep navy blue. She tilted it this way and that and bent down the brim over one eye for a look that spelled sultry sophistication, all as she pictured Roland and imagined how she would model it for him. How much more mature, more womanly, she seemed to herself since they had parted the previous autumn. Where was he now? When she lay down on the floor on top of her coat for a few hours of rest, she dreamed she had passed Roland in the teeming human parade on the road—people trudging in hope and despair toward some destination promising safety, when all it actually offered was a place to be frightened other than home.

  EIGHT

  OCCUPIED

  NEAR SIX IN THE EVENING on Friday, June 14, Italian warplanes dropped bombshells on Gray, the biggest one being the bone-chilling news that German forces were about to attack. Most residents, like the Günzburger women, had already fled. But a small band of four hundred steadfast Graylois who remained in town braced themselves for the dubious honor of being invaded on the very same day that Hitler achieved his most glorious triumph: his Eighteenth Army had just taken Paris.