To the dismay of the people, propaganda posters papered the walls of the town and encouraged its men to enlist for German factory jobs, and by the Kommandant’s orders, each issue of the local newspaper ran similar ads. “An end to the hard times!” the text declared. “Papa is earning money in Germany now!” And yet the Germans undermined their recruitment campaign with other posters openly hinting that their own men in Gray would usurp both the love and the hearths the French left behind: “Abandoned people, place your faith in the German soldier!” A handsome, uniformed Wehrmacht officer smiled from these posters with contented French children embraced by his arms. Small wonder that the volunteer rate proved so unsatisfying that by 1943 the Nazis would resort to forcing the French to work in German factory jobs, to stand in for their laborers sent into battle and thereby step up production of war supplies.
Still, recognizing the potential for German soldiers to compromise Gray’s lonely women, the town’s celibate mayor reluctantly acceded to the Kommandant’s order to set up a brothel. Monsieur Fimbel saw to it that prostitutes were imported from Dijon and Paris and that the bordello was furnished and kept sanitary. Costs were charged to the maintenance of the German occupied forces, with the bills to be paid by the people of France. But after the war, there would still be a handful of women, native to Gray, publicly shamed for fraternization. Among more than ten thousand other Frenchwomen later accused of “horizontal collaboration” with German soldiers, they were dragged to the city hall plaza and forced to submit to having their scalps entirely shaved.
Attempting to help Gray’s population survive beneath the yoke of oppression, André Fick and the mayor needed to run a few stealthy steps ahead of the Germans. With a golden rule of “discretion and silence,” Fick told me, they shielded the town from cruel Nazi excesses, using deceptions and lies to ward off reprisals and rescue many who would have been victims. They intervened to help the Graylois and, even as they manipulated to gain the trust of the Germans, the two Alsatian Marists subtly schemed right under their noses.
“We waged war against them,” André recalled on the day that I met him. “Not with guns and bayonets, but a war all the same, a war that we waged in writing and meetings.” And yet there were those, he sadly confided, who, regarding him as well as the mayor as tools of the Germans, maligned them in whispers as collaborators who helped to enforce the victors’ demands. “The people of Gray saw me go to the Kommandantur every day, and they viewed that as shady. They saw me go with my documents, and they said, ‘He’s a collaborator.’ That’s the normal reaction. My actions, like those of Monsieur Fimbel, were not always well understood by the population. They saw us go every day, but it was not to lick the boots of the Germans, but to press for favors for the people of Gray.”
All through the summer and fall of 1940, Joseph Fimbel continued to visit with Sigmar, his old Jewish friend. For warmth, as autumn set in, they sat at the kitchen table near the potbellied stove retrieved from Mulhouse, Alice doing her best with limited rations to offer the mayor simple refreshment. Even before the outbreak of fighting the previous winter, coupons dispensed at the mairie had fixed the amount of bread, meat, sugar, wine, flour, fats, soap, and charcoal allotted townspeople, based on their age and the work they performed. Once the Germans took over, claiming most of the food for themselves or for export to feed their country and troops, they held the Graylois to a diet of approximately one thousand six hundred calories a day, a limit they later cut almost in half. There were also restrictions on purchasing bicycle tires, textiles, and shoes, which led to new styles with soles made of wood. An informal bartering system quickly arose, with cigarettes readily serving as money.
In that first autumn of occupation, Gray’s agricultural setting provided residents with more copious food than those who lived in cities could find. There were fruits and vegetables in the marketplace on the broad cobblestoned plaza before town hall, and butter and eggs often available at nearby farms. And so, on the evenings the mayor came by, Alice was pleased to see him cheer up her husband and unstintingly served him her kitchen’s best, along with a cup of hot bouillon, a small glass of wine, or weak so-called coffee brewed out of chicory.
The two friends still occasionally sparred in religious debate, but increasingly, current events led to political worries, and one evening the mayor arrived to find Sigmar engulfed by hurt feelings that focused their talk on the tactical problems involved in escape. That afternoon’s mail had brought a postcard from Marie’s son Edy, writing from relative safety in Switzerland, where, as a military man seeking asylum, he’d been interned since France fell. What appeared on the surface as a genial family message from him actually bore oblique instructions that caught Sigmar’s eye and on closer inspection stirred his resentment.
“This would be a nice time to pay a visit to Mimi. Bring Bella,” Edy had guardedly written his mother. Postcards were the only mail the Germans allowed the Graylois to receive from outside the Occupied Zone, and unless their subject was tightly focused on family matters, censors destroyed them. But between Edy’s lines, Sigmar read a clear warning, one he found troubling not for its message, but rather for what it left out. Take Bella and maneuver now to get out of Gray and the Occupied Zone and into the so-called Free Zone by going “to visit” Mimi in Lyon, Edy advised. Of Sigmar and Alice, of Janine and Trudi, Edy wrote not a word. No, the nephew Sigmar loved like a son had no word for them, nothing, despite all Sigmar had done to shield Edy’s mother and Bella since fleeing Mulhouse the previous year.
Sigmar’s nephew Edmond “Edy” Cahen, a captain in the French Army, was held in Switzerland under terms of asylum after the Germans conquered France.
“Amène Bella. Amène Bella,” Sigmar muttered under his breath, indignant that Edy would instruct Marie to bring the housekeeper while blithely ignoring the rest of the family. Shame at reading his sister’s mail without her permission, albeit a postcard, prevented Sigmar from raising the issue with her. The unexpectedness of his nephew’s counsel also caught him off guard. Prohibited as a Jew from owning a radio and relying for news on the local newspaper—with La Presse Grayloise now heavily censored by the German Kommandantur—it was hard to know how the war was progressing. Carefully molding public opinion, the paper prominently featured reports of German triumphs in battle and warned that French “terrorists” faced execution.
So, Sigmar wondered, was it better to sit tight in Gray, where his friendship with Fimbel offered protection? Or would they be safer, as Edy suggested, in the unoccupied sector controlled by Pétain, a man who could not be expected to stick out his neck to save foreign-born Jews who ran there to hide? Even assuming they might be safer in Lyon, could they obtain transit papers to allow them to leave? Where would they live? And what about Norbert? They had heard nothing from him since he left with the Legion. Now that France was out of the war, what if his son made his way back to Gray only to find the family gone?
He decided to broach these questions to Fimbel when the mayor came to see him that evening, but his friend began by relaying terrible news. As part of a broad-scale roundup of Jews in Baden and other German border regions, the Nazis had deported to the French camp of Gurs every last Jew they could still find in Freiburg. Sigmar sat stunned. Fräulein Ellenbogen, Frau Loewy, all their friends still in the city when he’d fled with his family from Freiburg to Mulhouse—had they escaped, or had they been seized? His own complacency, remaining this long in occupied Gray, now seemed insane. Survival meant evading the Germans, not living as literal neighbors with the Kommandantur headquartered in the town’s former Chamber of Commerce just two doors away from the family’s apartment. With new urgency, Sigmar laid out his dilemma to Fimbel, who described in sobering detail the hurdles involved in crossing the border to the so-called Free Zone.
The border was virtually sealed, Fimbel said, unless one acquired a safe-conduct pass, which required approval from the German Kommandantur. With demand rising daily, desperate applicants swamped town hall wit
h requests for permission to cross the Demarcation Line between the two zones. Once processed by the French, all paperwork went to the German command. But the Germans systematically rejected any requests from Jews, and even non-Jews had to prove compelling reasons in order to gain the passes they needed: sick or dying relatives, children or parents in need of help, or faltering businesses that demanded attention. The postmaster, Malou’s father Monsieur Gieselbrecht, was secretly signing false papers that testified to telephone calls received at the Poste from outside the Occupied Zone, urgently summoning people home. As to fellow Alsatians who now risked being forced to fight in the German Army, Monsieur Fimbel was providing false identity papers to help them slip out of sight before they were drafted.
According to André Fick, among Frenchmen from Alsace-Lorraine whom the Germans would eventually draft to fight for the Reich in bloody Eastern Front battles, many deserters fled to Gray, having heard that the Alsatian-born mayor could arrange their “rebirth.” He gave them new names and work as laborers assigned to restore the war-torn farmland around the city. Trusted passeurs smuggled some to safety in Switzerland or over the line to the Unoccupied Zone, and later helped others escape to North Africa to join what was left of the Free French Army. Mayor Fimbel hid some escapees in trucks that carried supplies to larger towns like Dijon, where he reluctantly left them to plot their next moves, and he personally drove others up to the border, where a well-placed bribe of cognac, champagne, tobacco, or coffee could help raise the barriers. When the Nazis started hunting down Jews, the Marist mayor would help them flee, too, saving scores by furnishing them with transit papers, by warning targets of impending arrest, and by hiding others in the secluded countryside homes of his former students.
For his clandestine efforts, Joseph Fimbel depended upon a close, loyal team, and he soon suggested to Sigmar that Janine might come to work for him at the mairie. Her fluency in German and French, he said, would be valuable in helping his office cope with the flood of requests for safe-conduct passes. She could not be officially paid, but the job would offer unspoken potential. From a desk in town hall, Janine would deal with the many who frantically begged for papers to cross out of the zone and would help them fill out their forms in ways that bolstered their reasons to leave. Every few days, prepared to face questions, she would be sent with a stack of requests to the Kommandant, who examined these papers and signed the ones he chose to approve.
In retrospect, it is hard to believe that neither the mayor nor Sigmar addressed the risk of such regular contact with the German command, and that Janine herself, at just seventeen, would brave the perils of serving as an emissary between the mairie and the Kommandantur. Yet she leaped at the chance with enthusiasm and an unfamiliar sense of importance. She would later observe that the job in which she was so out of place that it put her in danger—a German Jewish refugee working in daily contact with a Wehrmacht commander who assumed she was French—made her feel, for the first time since leaving Roland, that her days had meaning and that she belonged. Applicants arrived at her desk with fear of rejection etched on their faces, and she tried to assist them. In front of the Germans, she did not let on that she was Jewish or German, and granted license to pretend to be French, she clung to that guise from that moment forward.
A new identity card, signed and stamped with the seal of the city and made out for her by André Fick, her supervisor, gives touching proof of his zeal to protect her. All the requisite information is duly recorded: her real name, along with the blue whorl of a fingerprint and a picture in which she appears completely untroubled, full cheeked, wide-eyed, fresh, and smiling, in a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a pin at her throat:
Janine’s new identity card, prepared by André Fick, attempted to conceal her German nationality.
SIZE: 1 meter 68
HAIR: chestnut
MUSTACHE: none
EYES: blue
NOSE: straight
FACE SHAPE: oblong
SKIN COLOR: light
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: none visible
Domicile? The answer, Gray, is one André Fick wrote in script at least four times the size of any other word on the card. But as to nationality, he scrawled a response in letters so tiny, obscured beneath the stamp of the city, that even with a powerful magnifying glass, the answer remains intentionally indecipherable.
Decades later, when I sat with him in front of the fireplace of his tidy home, André remembered that Trudi and Malou had found his fondness for Janine amusing. Trailing behind him, openly giggling, they made him self-conscious when he walked the streets, already feeling confused and troubled by such tender yearnings for Janine as bred guilt in the face of his spiritual goals. His longtime intent of following in his role model’s footsteps—he still recalled confessing to her—would require affirming the same Marist vows that Mayor Fimbel had taken and bar him from marriage. Yet he had despaired that his affection for Janine pointed to weakness that might preclude a celibate life.
“I envisioned our having a future together,” he said of Janine. Nostalgia for the long-lost girl who awakened desire overwhelmed the fact that his wife, Marguerite, was seated beside him. “But in any event, Janine said no to my vision. As she was a Jew, and I was Catholic, it just couldn’t work, especially given the state of the world.”
What went unsaid in 1940 and again in 2001 was that Janine had already given her love to another French Catholic who came from Mulhouse. And while Roland seemed as remote to her during her time in Gray as a matinee idol, his claim on her heart precluded all other suitors. Indeed, Janine’s love for Roland had grown stronger. It burned bright and pure, untarnished by any sort of careless word or fickle deed that may dim love’s ardor when, being together, a couple take each other for granted.
The Kreiskommandant in charge of the town was fiftyish, a Wehrmacht reservist called back to duty to sit at a desk, not a young, rabid Nazi flexing his muscles or a man like the captain in breeches and boots who daily rode his powerful horse through Gray’s humble streets, making a splendid show of himself. That is how André Fick recalled the top officer who figured in my mother’s account like a cipher, a symbol, a uniform only, a hollow man in whom I might see all of Nazism’s evils or view as the rote overseer of an occupied town.
Every few days after beginning her job with the mayor, Janine entered this Kommandant’s office and proffered the laissez-passer, or Ausweis, papers to sign while she stood at his desk and considered the way he handled this work. Subordinate officers streamed in and out, the telephone rang, and weightier matters demanded attention, distracting his thoughts. The Führer’s black eyes glared at her from a framed photograph affixed to the wall, but the Kommandant was polite in his dealings and rarely demanded more information than the papers provided. As weeks wore on, she wanted to think he was growing bored by the process, that he rushed through it faster, with less concentration, whenever the sheaf she presented was thick. On pressure-filled days, he barely bothered to read the applicants’ names and their destinations, and while there were other instances when he eyed them sharply, she gradually started feeling emboldened. She moved closer in to his left, leaning over the desk, and ventured flipping the pages for him—a considerate girl—so the tops of the sheets, including applicants’ names, were partially hidden. She also dared some brief conversation, assuming her French was better than his and that he would not detect a German accent that would betray her refugee status and reveal her as Jewish.
A scheme had started to form in her mind: if she slipped an extra application into the pile she presented for signing, leaving blank the names of the would-be travelers, the Kommandant might unwittingly sign it, enabling her family to use the pass themselves. If the German officer noticed the error, she would pretend it was simply an honest mistake. “Oh, je m’excuse!” She practiced shock and dismay in front of the mirror, eyes round in horror, hands clasped to her chest. She would snatch the faulty application away, berating herself with abject disgust. “But h
ow can this be? What a stupid mistake! I don’t understand how this could happen, Herr Kommandant!” What would he do? Would he instantly guess she had done it on purpose or chalk it up to her youth and sloppy work habits?
In mid-November, Janine decided to act, but resolved not to discuss it beforehand with anyone. She did not need to hear the dangers sketched out, as she had already done so in ample detail to frighten herself. Nor did she want to invite attempts to dissuade her, which she feared might be easy. Two weeks earlier, the Germans had suddenly evicted them from their apartment on the avenue Victor Hugo, its convenience as an officers’ lodging, just steps away from the Kommandantur, having attracted official attention. While Sigmar suspected that the landlord no longer felt comfortable renting to Jews and had offered it up to the occupiers, the Germans in any event requisitioned whatever homes and buildings they wanted. Mayor Fimbel had helped the family relocate, yet merely venturing out on the street grew ever more perilous, and Sigmar was gripped by the urgent need to escape.
And so, as Janine steeled herself to proceed with her plan, she yearned above all to impress her father, who was bound to be grateful and think her resourceful; yes, among all her motives that one stood out—the ever-present, aching compulsion to gain Sigmar’s respect. To rescue the family—what could be better? It excited her, too, to imagine telling Roland how she had managed all on her own to bring the family over the line, because if ever they managed to wiggle out of this dull little town, perhaps she would even be able to find him!
Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed Page 16
