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

by Leslie Maitland

  The Italians had jumped into the war only four days before, with France’s defeat already in sight. They descended on Gray at the Luftwaffe’s orders—like heralds for their more powerful allies—bombing the normally busy quai Mavia on the left bank of the Saône, the gas company, and the perimeter of Gray’s railroad station, where trains evacuating equipment and troops from the Maginot Line monopolized tracks and prevented departures. Frantic refugees and bands of disorganized soldiers jammed the station as they clamored for trains, and a Red Cross canteen strained to feed them with meager resources.

  The next morning, with German troops moving on Gray from across the river, leaving a trail of fire and dead civilians and soldiers behind them, French Army engineers set dynamite to blow out three bridges over the Saône, hoping to thwart the German offensive. In the early afternoon, three great explosions rocked the small city as its bridges went flying, cutting off traffic over the Saône and temporarily halting the flow of electricity, water, and gas.

  The battle that followed that day began with two uneven forces fixing their sights on each other over the river. A ragtag assortment of defending French soldiers—outmanned, outgunned, and sadly outfoxed—was forced to retreat only hours after the fighting had started. Crossing the Saône on their own inflatable dinghies, in boats they found moored along the right bank, or by land over one small bridge that had not been destroyed, the Germans advanced in relentless assault. Their powerful tanks and artillery bombarded Gray’s empty streets, and their bombers, streaking in waves overhead, torched the crest of the town as well as the level sections close to the river. Buildings burst into flame, and by late afternoon the hellfire devouring their beloved church’s bell tower seared the soul of the small Catholic city. A French captain would later describe the dirge of the church bells—partially melting as they dropped from the tower in a burning hail of stones and debris—tolling their last, a death knell that mourned the town’s forced surrender.

  Within the hour, Nazi storm troopers seized control of the town. Later that evening a German officer strode into Monsieur Gieselbrecht’s post office to demand that the mayor be summoned to the foot of the damaged Stone Bridge to receive orders. While the citizenry fled, the mayor had stayed on in Gray to assist its defenses. But the imperious German commander was not disposed to negotiate terms with the French official who arrived at the bridge—tall and patrician, wearing a suit and a bow tie.

  “Sénateur-Maire Moïse Lévy.” The mayor introduced himself with the slightest of nods.

  “Sie … Jude?” You … a Jew? the German lieutenant colonel reportedly sputtered at hearing the name, amazement leaving him virtually speechless, which turned out not to matter, as he and the mayor could barely understand one another. The officer fished for a monocle that he fixed in his eye, then studied the elderly Frenchman as if searching for something beside the Old Testament name that might betray his unsuitable lineage. Unflinching, Mayor Lévy stood erect for inspection with a full head of close-cropped snowy-white hair and a curling mustache with a smile of its own. “Juif? Oui!” he replied, no sign of fear on his dignified features, as witnesses later described that encounter.

  Instead, Gray’s Jewish mayor, then seventy-seven, was the first man in town to show open resistance to German orders of occupation, orders that began by imposing a curfew and quickly moved on to restricting resources. The Germans wanted all the French wounded removed from the hospital to make way for their own injured soldiers. Then they commanded the firefighters to stop using water to extinguish the flames still claiming buildings all over the city. Water was strictly reserved for the Germans, for their men in the hospital or installed in town barracks. They refused to yield to entreaties or accept proof that the local water supply could amply fulfill everyone’s needs while also putting out fires now rapidly spreading. As a result, personal consequences be damned, Mayor Lévy assumed authority for saving the town by overturning directives given his firemen. Elected as mayor first in 1912, after twenty years as town councillor, Lévy had won city hall many times over and counted on having his instructions obeyed.

  Gray’s longtime Jewish mayor, Moïse Lévy, was also a senator in the National Assembly. (photo credit 8.1)

  According to André Fick—a Mulhouse-born teacher who resettled in Gray to serve as Monsieur Fimbel’s assistant, became a good friend to Janine, and later wrote about life there under the Germans—the mayor inscribed his own edict on the back of a business card he gave to the firemen: “Senator-Mayor Moïse Lévy gives the order, under his personal responsibility, to continue fighting the fires.” Thus for the next ten days and nights, as his word somehow prevailed, the town battled the blazes that threatened buildings and homes, especially as French-British bombing missions continued to target the German invaders after Gray was defeated.

  On city halls all over the region, the black swastika was hoisted in place of the tricolor as the Germans swept south and west from Sedan and fanned out across France, their troops swarming like locusts from Switzerland’s border toward the Atlantic. On June 15, after little more than one day of fighting, the Germans succeeded in seizing Verdun with losses of fewer than two hundred men, a goal they had failed to achieve in ten months of fighting in 1916, despite a death toll eighty times higher. President Roosevelt rejected an urgent plea for assistance, and the British failed to provide sufficient support to persuade the French of their wholehearted commitment as allies. Less than three months before, Great Britain and France had agreed that neither side would make a separate peace with the Germans, but now the situation had changed. Overwhelmed, France capitulated.

  On June 17, in a radio broadcast from the French government’s Bordeaux encampment, Marshal Pétain, the beloved eighty-four-year-old hero of Verdun in the previous war, announced that he was replacing Prime Minister Reynaud, who had resigned. Pétain, who blamed the British for France’s collapse, announced he would seek an end to the fighting through an armistice to be negotiated in “a spirit of honor.” The next day, however, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, having escaped to London, broadcast his own appeal to the French to take heart and pursue the fight against Hitler. He said he was ready to start assembling an army.

  “France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war!” De Gaulle exhorted the French to stand firm with the forces of freedom. “Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!” This call to arms prompted Pétain to denounce as cowards those who had fled avoiding surrender. He arranged to have a military court try the rebellious de Gaulle in absentia and that August, with de Gaulle still safely in London, condemn him to death. As for Reynaud, Pétain had him arrested, and he was held prisoner in Germany until after the war.

  While the governments of The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg opted for political exile after their armies surrendered rather than do business with Hitler, Pétain welcomed the idea of peace talks as a means of ending the war and resuming a national life that was more or less normal. The losses of battle incurred in only six weeks already weighed heavy: a toll of ninety thousand French dead, two hundred thousand injured, and nearly two million prisoners of war.

  But the terms of armistice signed on June 22 were not up for discussion as Pétain had suggested. Rather, they were handed down as a diktat from Hitler himself at a meeting elaborately staged in the same railcar in the forest of Compiègne where the Treaty of Versailles sealed Germany’s ignominious defeat in World War I. Worse, the armistice purposely mirrored in significant ways the punishments that the earlier treaty imposed on the Germans. Now it was the Germans’ turn to demand the French Army be cut to a maximum force of one hundred thousand, and they strangled the French economy in a tightening noose of reparations that amounted to 60 percent of its income. But harshest of all were the conditions set forth for occupation, which provided for Germany to rule the rich northern two-thirds of the French mainland and Pétain’s government to retain limited control of the southern third only. The occupied north gave th
e Germans Paris, the coastlines along the Atlantic as well as the Channel, access to Spain, and the vast majority of France’s population, industry, food, and resources.

  The border between the Occupied and the so-called Free Zone (later changed to the more ominous Unoccupied Zone) would be controlled like one between two different countries, requiring special German permission for the French to cross over the line from one to the other. The Reich recaptured Alsace and Lorraine, and Hitler outlined a so-called Reserved Zone (including Gray) that he slated for annexation sometime in the future, with an extra presence of Germans in charge from the start. In an effort to strip the people of Alsace and Lorraine of their French self-identification, even wearing berets was forbidden. The French language there was banned in churches, in schools, and in commerce, and French names of people and places were forced into German.

  In Mulhouse, the fanciful pink mairie now became the Bürgermeisteramt, as did city halls all over the region, while the conquering Germans also changed the names of main thoroughfares to honor the Führer. This they would do all over the country. But where else could the name change have proved so mordantly witty by virtue of being so unwittingly apt, when new signs for the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse were posted along the rue du Sauvage, the Street of the Savage?

  During the next few years, young men and women of Alsace and Lorraine would be required to join the Reich Labor Service, their boys pressed into the Hitler Youth corps, and their men drafted to fight for the Germans. French prisoners of war would be held until permanent peace was established, which ultimately led to three-quarters of the nearly two million French prisoners being kept by the Reich through five years of war. The armistice further required the French to hand over all anti-Nazi German refugees living in France, which obviously had dire implications for the Jews who had fled there, escaping from Hitler.

  New attacks linked Jews with Communists and Freemasons as the combined historical cause of most of the miseries inflicted on France. Before long, newspapers and propaganda depicting Jews as thieves and rats began calling for the French government to suppress the “vermin” who, for their own greedy reasons, had pushed the nation into the war.

  It was hardly a jailbreak, but Sigmar escaped from the Fort de la Bonnelle in Langres as the German Army closed in and his French guards—morally queasy about leaving inmates locked up while they themselves ran away—opened the gates of the dungeon and advised all their captives to do what they could to save their own necks. Together with the other Günzburger from Gray, with whom he’d grown friendly, Sigmar fled over a footbridge of logs that spanned the moat encircling the fortress, took to the woods, and wound through the fighting in an effort to travel back to his family. Not having witnessed the hysterical panic that drove most of the French to flee as far as they could from the Germans as they advanced, he assumed he would find the women where he had left them. Now, as the fighting raged around the two German Jews with the same name, and they struggled to stay out of sight while sneaking southeast toward Gray, their fears grew with every step. To be caught by the French might mean being mistaken for German spies and, under pressure of battle, could result in their being shot on the spot. To be captured by Germans certainly augured no better result.

  The guardhouse of the nineteenth-century Fort de la Bonnelle in Langres, where Sigmar was held under suspicion of being a spy for the Germans (photo credit 8.2)

  Without any money and no place to sleep, they were tired, dirty, and terribly hungry, as they traced the German invaders’ scarred and smoking path to the Saône. But relief at reaching the water turned to despair when they discovered the bridges to Gray destroyed. From one severed span to the next, the two men followed the river and scrambled down the slippery banks. They were weighing the risks of swimming across when they found a battered old rowboat tied to the trunk of a willow, half hidden in the tall river grass, minus its oars. Together—more or less in cahoots, after all, as the police had suggested long weeks before—they dragged the old vessel into the water and, ignoring the soft black stew of leaves coating the bottom, they got on their knees to try to paddle the boat with their hands.

  Without oars, of course, it was challenging to keep it moving ahead. Their knees, shoulders, and back muscles ached as they desperately stretched to pull through the currents. Aiming to land at the green slope of a picnic spot on the opposite shore known as “the beach” to the locals of Gray, they labored for hours. Drawing closer, they could not fail to notice the absence of Notre-Dame’s bell tower, with its three-tiered crown and watchful French cock. Horrified by the hole in the skyline, both men stopped paddling. Their puckered fingers rested on the rough, splintered gunwales, while the wind gently rocked them. Though the day was warm, they shivered at the sight of smoke that curled like an Indian signal from the rubble of buildings that lay flattened and smoldering. Sigmar’s apartment on the avenue Victor Hugo was frighteningly close to the ruins of the church. He felt old and exhausted, not ready to deal with what he might learn. How he wished he could sit there, peacefully drifting as the sun set on the darkening river and fires licked the night orange.

  In the time that Sigmar spent locked up in Langres, his friend Joseph Fimbel had become Gray’s man of the hour. He had risked his life atop ladders, joining the firemen in battling blazes. He stood beside Mayor Lévy at the cemetery where the local priest led combined funeral rites for a score of men, women, and children killed in the battle and bombing. And with his perfect knowledge of German, he was named by Mayor Lévy commissioner in charge of relations with the German Kommandantur as part of a special city committee to establish order under the Occupation. Among their first problems was feeding the people. The Germans issued a punishing ruling that barred millers from delivering flour to bakers, ordering them to use only the flour previously stored by the French military. That flour, however, now reeked of petrol that the French Army had poured over its own stocks before the invasion to ruin it in case the enemy seized it. The resulting baked goods were rancid and seemed to the French—tied to the land through their bread—to epitomize all the privations of war.

  Joseph Fimbel (center) assisted the firefighters after bombing raids set Gray aflame. (photo credit 8.3)

  “Until these supplies are used up, no other bread will be delivered to the population,” the German authorities warned. They also directed that bakers wait twenty-four hours after baking bread before selling it, which meant the baguettes turned stale and dry before reaching the table. For the Graylois, this bread would linger forever on memory’s palate with the foul aftertaste of humiliation.

  Life was increasingly governed by new sets of rules, some imposed by the Germans directly, others sent down from the French prefect of the Haute-Saône to regional mayors. Cafés were to be open to civilians only between eleven and one and between five and nine in the evening; driving was forbidden between ten in the evening and five in the morning; traveling by car or bicycle required authorization from the nearest military headquarters or Kommandantur; all firearms were to be surrendered at town hall; and all publications, including posters, were to be submitted to the German authorities for review and approval before being printed.

  The front page of a censored edition of La Presse Grayloise sent the people a message to bear up under a grim situation that they had, in large measure, brought on themselves. The same theme was drummed into France as a whole through the censored newspapers that spread the will of the Germans, thinly camouflaged as objective reporting.

  “Beloved people: one word, a single directive. Work. The French people want to work to repair past errors committed under the guidance of its bad shepherds,” Paris Soir said on June 24, as in following days it advocated faith in Pétain, obedience to German commands, and strict economy in every household. News photographs showed clean-cut German soldiers socializing with bevies of lovely French girls, obviously enjoying themselves. “Not as evil as alleged,” applauded the caption, urging a positive view of the occupiers.

  Resour
ces, meanwhile, grew even scarcer as the ceaseless influx of weary refugees shambling through Gray, traveling back to the homes they had fled just a few weeks before, swelled the numbers of homeless and hungry. To assist them, Monsieur Fimbel established a welcome committee and opened a shelter in a girls’ school just up the street from the Günzburgers’ vacant apartment. In the Ermitage Sainte-Marie, they served six thousand three hundred free hot meals between June 21 and August 6, while also providing new German-approved visas, coupons for gas, and a wall on which distraught travelers could publicly post pleas for news of lost family members and information on how to reach one another.

  It was here, somewhat dazed, locked out of his apartment, and gripped by fear over the fate of his family, that Sigmar spotted Joseph Fimbel. Though shamed by his filth, Sigmar fell into the tall Marist’s arms and, abandoning his usual reserve, allowed himself to take comfort—the first he had known since his arrest—in the enveloping warmth of the other man’s friendship. Dry sobs choked his words, then, reverting to German, he started to stammer out questions.

  “Meine Familie?” he asked. “They are not home! Where is Lisel? Janine and Trudi? My sister and Bella?” He did not pause for an answer before he had listed them all.

  Monsieur Fimbel described his trip with the women to Arnay-le-Duc just two weeks before and tried to assure him that, almost certainly, they had run farther south from the path of the German incursion and would make their way back as soon as they could. His eyes smiled through thick glasses. “Have trust in the Lord,” Monsieur Fimbel said, invoking the God that both of them shared. “Patience. I know He will bring them back safely.”