One afternoon, as Janine and her friend Malou sat on a bench in the grass, reading and talking, Malou jumped to her feet to confront a German soldier who was taking their picture. Not for her to wind up on exhibit in some German scrapbook, the butt of jokes in the barracks or the barbs of the Fräuleins he might later attempt to make jealous back home, or to let it appear she had willingly posed, a too-friendly local, scantily clad, welcoming the soldier’s advances! She demanded his film, and he acceded. Then, not yet invited to sit, but granted an audience by virtue of his gracious surrender, he stood chatting with them, and it was shortly disclosed that this soldier working so hard to pursue conversation was, by coincidence, a native of Freiburg. Heinz Rosenstihl, just twenty-two, gaped in mirrored surprise at the news that Janine had come from the very same town, each of them hence a Freiburger Bobbele. Delight filled his face, and he suggested that Janine might know of his family through their stable and riding school in the bucolic eastern part of the city called Littenweiler. And before very long, as invariably occurs when travelers run into someone who hails from their town, Janine began to probe for details, the temptation to hear about friends left behind and inquire about home chipping away at her wall of reserve.
Marie-Louise “Malou” Gieselbrecht, Janine’s closest friend, in a boat on the Saône River
Adrift in the war, this boy and this girl, soldier and refugee, German and Jew, spent a few happy minutes exploring their common Black Forest childhoods. Memories hung in the warm summer air: the fair at the Meßplatz, the view from the Schauinsland, the bubbling Bächle, steamed noodle cakes drenched in caramel sauce, Spätzle and pretzels. By the next time they met by chance at the river, Heinz Rosenstihl had decided to save her. He felt especially drawn to this pretty young woman, whom he could almost believe he had known as a child. Somebody’s classmate, the friend of a friend, a blue-eyed young girl he had passed in a park or a bakery or maybe on skis in the mountains long before she had captured his fancy on the banks of the Saône.
“Hitler will take over the whole world, including Palestine, but I can save you,” he solemnly told her. He sounded pleased by his noble intention and looked to Malou, like him a Catholic, to help Janine accept the inevitable. “That’s the only way you’ll survive. All the Jews are going to be killed, but I’ll marry you and take you home to my family in Freiburg. We’ll tell everybody that you lost all your papers, and then we’ll make up whatever we have to. Your family will be happy to know that at least one of you will be left alive. And, who knows, there’s a chance that from Germany you might be able to help them somehow.”
Janine sat stunned into silence, but Malou chewed on a long stalk of grass as she sized up the soldier’s husband potential. “Don’t be too quick to say no,” Malou whispered to Janine. “He’s not bad, you know, and he may have a point. Let’s give it some thought.” But Janine was already standing, collecting her things.
“Thank you,” she told him. “Really, wirklich, it’s kind and brave of you to make such an offer, but we should not even be seen here with you, talking together in public this long.” Flustered, she pulled on her skirt and blouse, slipped on her shoes, stuffed her towel and book in a bag, and granted him a smile of good-bye in place of openly shaking his hand.
“Ist er verrückt?” Sigmar exploded when Janine got home and told him what happened. He instructed her never to speak with the soldier again (the young man’s sanity being called into question), even though he conceded knowing Freiburg’s Rosenstihl family and remembered them as respectable people. For Janine, of course, it mattered little what her father thought of the soldier’s background, as her own marital interests stopped short in Mulhouse. The German’s proposal had drawn her thoughts to Roland, and she realized that if he had suggested leaving her family and escaping the Nazis through Christian marriage, the ring might have already been on her finger, with safety just a side benefit of everything else she desperately wanted. She prayed for God’s help in finding the man she adored, while never exactly confessing his name for fear that Abraham’s God of judgment and vengeance might fatally frown on her choosing a Catholic. Why trouble the Lord with details, she figured, at a time when He was already so busy with world-shaking matters? After the war, she would hopefully find a way to persuade Him—or at least her own parents—that Roland’s different faith should not be cause to keep them apart.
For now divine intervention seemed necessary. With Alsace and Lorraine swallowed into the Reich, even contact with Mulhouse was out of the question. On July 16, a German order expelled all Jews from Alsace, with thousands given just one hour’s warning before being forced to assemble in the Mulhouse synagogue courtyard to be loaded on trucks and carted out of the Occupied Zone. The reports that traveled to Gray began to fill in the shadows that shaped Private Rosenstihl’s warning. But a week or so after his sudden and daring marriage proposal, Janine found herself summoned to her school principal’s office. An unsmiling, ferretlike man with dark thinning hair and a little mustache, the principal had worked himself into a rage.
“What do you think you’re you doing, fraternizing with a German soldier?” he demanded, indignant. “Certainly, as a Jew, mademoiselle, you should understand the perils of this! Have you really no shame in front of your people?”
“Monsieur, I don’t know what you mean,” Janine replied in confusion, but with a brusque wave of his arm, he cut her off.
“Then I’m sure you can tell me why Private Rosenstihl came here to see me! He claimed he wanted to marry you in order to rescue you. He suggested that I talk to your father to win his consent. But I refuse to get involved in this matter! And I’d advise you in the strongest possible terms not to get involved with him, either, although it appears I’m already too late.”
The next time the soldier from Freiburg approached her as she and Malou lay in the grass at the river, Janine did not shrink from voicing annoyance. Now his desire to protect her without her permission struck her as crazy and oddly pretentious.
“Maintenant, ça suffit!” That’s enough! she snapped in French at the crestfallen soldier, calling the thing to a halt and punishing him by refusing to speak the badisch dialect that had been like a verbal vacation for them. “I’d rather die with my parents than escape with you. How could you think I’d go off and leave them? I can’t marry you, and now I can’t even speak to you either.”
In my younger years, I wanted to trust that the French had all been resisters, if not actively flouting personal danger, then at least in the way that they viewed their invaders and the suffering the Nazis inflicted on Jews throughout Europe. This was before the French publicly searched their own historical record through films and books and trials that explored their actions during the war, and it clearly reflected my mother’s perception and all she had told me. Her love for Roland, her friendships with Malou and others, her embrace of their country instead of her own disgraced homeland, and oui, her careful decision to paint herself as having been French from the day she was born—all of these went into the mix that turned me into a Francophile.
My identification with the mother I worshipped translated cleanly into a love of the country where she happily lived during four otherwise terrible years of Europe’s worst turmoil. With the razorlike moral distinctions acceptable only in childhood, I therefore grew up dividing the villains and heroes in all of her stories with a line far more fixed than their changeable borders. As the Nazis were evil, I blocked out the language my grandparents spoke, which I heard every day all around me, while my studies of French leaped ably ahead, thanks to a private instructor—the French widow of an American soldier—retained by my mother for weekly lessons.
Indeed, Mom never said anything to suggest that the French had ever collaborated with Hitler, while she claimed to have encountered more blatant anti-Semitism in the United States than she had personally experienced in France, or even in Germany, for that matter. To me, this stark, unfamiliar assertion raised the threat that Jews were at risk in Americ
a also, and I could not help but cringe every time she made it. I had no grounds to refute the way that she sidestepped accounts of French persecution, maintaining instead that the French, victims themselves, had been forced in the 1940s to yield to the will of the conquering Nazis. She could no more blame France than bury her love for Roland.
In recent decades, scholars have offered more damning accounts, showing that although many French harbored no particular hatred of Jews, the French government under Pétain zealously leveled sanctions against them. What Pétain described as collaboration, a viable means of coexistence with Germans within France’s borders, quickly gave rise to endorsement—emulation, in fact—of policies aimed at destroying the Jews. In some cases, the Vichy administration readily jumped forward, enacting sanctions even before the Germans required them, while some of the measures the French imposed early on were even harsher than parallel statutes the Nazis devised.
Between the Germans and Vichy, the situation for Jews in both parts of the country began changing quickly. Neither zone represented a reliable haven for a population of Jews that had swelled from 150,000 in 1919 to 350,000 by World War II, among a total French population of 40 million. Another 400,000 Jews would pass through France in those years as stateless refugees hoping to find safety elsewhere, only to find themselves caught in the grip of the Vichy regime, which willingly handed off many thousands to the Germans. On a psychological level, how could the French despair for Jews deported to camps as long as 1.5 million of their own men were being held by the Reich as prisoners of war, most not free to come home until Hitler’s defeat?
A representative anti-Semitic cartoon of the Vichy era depicts the hooked-nosed “Patriotic Jew,” apparently a financier, congratulating himself with these words: “500,000 francs for the nation, 1 million for the Jewish Marxists. I have served the Jewish people well again today.” (photo credit 9.3)
That August 1940, Vichy unleashed one of its first assaults upon Jews by repealing the Marchandeau Law, which had outlawed racist attacks in the press. This enabled Hitler’s propaganda machine to begin feeding the public the same sort of anti-Semitic vitriol it had spewed years before to incite the Germans. The date of this action, August 27, sent chills through my mother, as did the date two months before when French prisoners were marched out of Gray on June 27 to be sent into captivity over the Rhine. “It figures—you know today’s date,” Janine remarked as she and Trudi stood on the street sadly watching them leave.
Yes, in the course of my research into her story, I, too, have been struck by how often that number she dreads reappears. On September 27, 1940, as Germany signed a Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan aimed at keeping America out of the war, the Nazis called for a census of Jews and imposed the first anti-Jewish ordinance on the Occupied Zone. It would not go unnoticed that the date of the measure came exactly 149 years from September 27, 1791, the day that a vote of the National Assembly made France the first country in Europe to offer Jews full citizenship.
It was March 27, 1942, when the first German transport sent more than a thousand Jews from detention in France to death at Auschwitz. On May 27, 1943, the National Council of the Resistance first met in Paris and, led by Jean Moulin, voted to place its confidence in de Gaulle to restore the Republic. But the daring Moulin—soon captured and brutally tortured by the Gestapo in Lyon—died in custody on a train bound for Germany. On July 27, 1944, the Germans moved to crush the Resistance, gunning down five French patriots in front of a Lyon café on the place Bellecour, where their bodies were left sprawled on display as a warning to others. A memorial marking the spot where their blood stained the sidewalk lists the names of all the Nazi camps that befouled the countries of Europe. Among them, the death camp of Auschwitz, where two million captives were murdered, was liberated by Soviet troops six months after the Lyon slayings. The date, January 27, 1945, is now annually observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Is there some benefit, then, to fixing one number, as my mother has done, fearing one day a month as being portentous? The answer could only be yes if it left twenty-nine others for breath to come easy, but that was not the case here. Vichy imposed two broad-ranging Statuts des juifs on the so-called Free Zone on October 3 and 4, 1940, banning Jews from many public and private professions and placing them in a lower position under French law. Foreign-born Jews could be arrested and interned in “special camps” or assigned to distant compounds under surveillance, a ruling that carried grave implications.
French Jewish leaders reacted with respectful but vigorous protests, noting that Jewish citizens remained, as ever, faithful to France. In a statement decrying the measures, Chief Rabbi Isaiah Schwartz called for equality and affirmed that “no values could be dearer to us” than those of “work, family, and homeland” that Vichy had chosen to define its regime. “We will respond to a law of exclusion by unswerving devotion to the homeland,” the rabbi wrote to Marshal Pétain, who did not respond. Like Alfred Dreyfus decades before, French Jews now refused to allow their victimization to shake their sense of themselves as true citizens, loyal to country. In 1940, moreover, on the defensive again, French Jewry insisted that citizenship guaranteed them rights of protection that the stateless refugees who had swarmed over their borders could not hope to claim. And so, much like my mother acting on instinct, keeping faith with that country and pretending to be what she wanted to be, the Jews of France proudly asserted their right to be French. They needed to trust in France as their savior, or else they had nothing.
TEN
CROSSING THE LINE
SIXTY-ONE YEARS from that summer in Gray when my mother peeked through the shutters on the avenue Victor Hugo to watch German soldiers in swimsuits march to the river, I arrived in August 2001 to find a muscular swirl of triathlon runners and cyclists jolting its drowsy Renaissance streets. In the Saône’s choppy waters, what appeared to be seals were swimmers in wet suits, shiny and black, racing downstream. And as crowds cheered contestants from all over France, a message of life and renewal rang through this town, always linked in my childhood to stories of war.
My appointment that day was with André Fick, a former top aide to Gray’s Mayor Fimbel. He was then eighty-four, and as racing cyclists swarmed through the town, I was surprised to meet him astride a bike, too, cruising his street and gallantly watching for me in case I had trouble finding his house. I’d remembered his name from wartime documents my mother had shown me, letters on which his official signature had worked like a lifeline during the years the Germans were there. Without André Fick, my own existence would have been doubtful. Yet in the instant we met, I disappeared, for he leaped over years and mistook me for Janine.
“Ah, it’s wonderful to see you,” he said, his tone unusually formal for an avowal that proved disarmingly candid: “Vous savez, j’ai toujours eu le béguin pour vous.” You know, I’ve always had a crush on you. He clasped my hand, reclaimed Janine in my eyes and my voice and, lured by memories, slipped through a chink in time to a faraway moment when living in danger brought depth to relations. Behind heavy glasses, tears brimmed in his light blue eyes, and for one selfish instant I wanted to be her, my mother, the source of a dream he had never forgotten.
The son of a Mulhouse grocer, André Fick had been a devoted young Marist who studied and taught in Fimbel-run schools. Drafted into the French Army on the eve of the war, like so many other Alsatians he avoided going back home after defeat in June 1940 for fear that the Germans would force him to fight for the Reich. Instead, he eagerly followed Monsieur Fimbel to Gray, where, at just twenty-three, he took on the job of city liaison to the German command during more than four years of harsh occupation.
In his own written account of that difficult period, Gray à l’Heure Allemande (Gray in the time of the Germans), André Fick tells how the forces that occupied Gray gave shape to defeat for its downhearted people. For each, he says, the ordeal inevitably became something different. Some lost all that they had in the bombings and
fires and dwelled on the shaky edge of existence. Some suffered the absence of a husband, a brother, a son, or a father imprisoned by Germans in mysterious camps. Many, especially women, were crushed by the burden of scrounging for daily subsistence, while others cunningly worked the black market, growing wealthy by milking the hunger of neighbors. Some were resigned, accepting the long Occupation with stoicism. Others believed resolutely in Marshal Pétain and that he would do the best for the country. The thirst for liberty and a gut-deep revulsion provoked by the Fascists prompted some, but not many, to risk their lives and join the Resistance. Others crept into the underground fight less for the aim of subverting the Nazis than as a means to evade the roundup of Frenchmen condemned to labor over the Rhine. With no way to guess how long the domination would last, fear and powerlessness weighed on the town like a low-lying fog.
The rules under which they endured, Fick recalled, multiplied daily in inverse ratio to the dwindling food in their larders. Verboten, forbidden: the right to assemble in public in groups of more than three people. Verboten: displaying the humbled French flag or French decorations. Verboten: photographing the exterior of any buildings or listening to foreign radio stations, especially London’s. Verboten: singing the “Marseillaise” and engaging in any political action. Verboten: to travel without official approval.
The problem in Gray was the same one confounding local authorities throughout the Occupied Zone, required under the armistice “to conform to the regulations of the German authorities and collaborate with them in a correct manner.” But what did that mean? Among the Graylois, citizens viewed collaboration with an added measure of dubiousness based on the fact that Mayor Fimbel and his assistant were native neither to Gray nor even to the Haute-Saône department. As Alsatians, moreover, both spoke fluent German and seemed quickly to win the trust of their masters.
Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed Page 15
