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

by Leslie Maitland

  All that remains now is the matter of your family. No one, ma chérie, can force you to marry a man you don’t want. Don’t let yourself be discouraged by anything your family will tell you. It is normal for parents, only wanting the best for you, wishing and believing that they are acting to secure your future, to try to make you marry the man they choose. It is normal that they should combat in you that which they dismiss as puppy love. It is for you to show them enough ferocity, enough energy, to make them understand that you will create your own happiness.

  With time, your parents may also try to sow doubts as to my love for you. They may not want to believe that I still love you and that time will have changed nothing in me! Have faith in me and do not let yourself fall into despair over these arguments. The foundation of our love and the fulfillment of our happiness depend upon mutual trust. Don’t ever forget, ma chérie, that you have my complete confidence, you have it completely, and that I count on you for all of life. I give you my word that we will be married.

  You see, ma chérie, fate has sent us a test so that our love will achieve its full greatness. You are everything for me, and I do not want to speak here of all my pain in letting you leave, going so far from me, but know that if I had to lose you, nothing good would come of my life. You are my goal. And this reward, do you see, ma chère Janot, I want to merit it. I must make something of myself to deserve you and deserve at the same time my own happiness. I would like you to realize the entire sum of love and of tenderness that I have for you and that I do not dare to let you know for fear of frightening you. But this love can do much in a life. It is love that influences everything else. Guard this love for me, ma chérie, and believe in me. You are now my fiancée; remember that when you see me again, it will be to become my wife, never to leave me again. Already I am entirely yours.

  I embrace you, ma chérie, with absolute faith in you and in the future. Reread these lines on the days when nothing goes right in the hope that they may be able to give you a bit of courage and convey all the dreams I can put in a kiss. Receive all my kisses, the very little ones and the most profound and the most passionate, and guard them well until the day when we see each other again. This love is a precious deposit that I leave with you. May you be able to return it to me intact and without blemish on the day you come back. And then, you know, we will never be alone in struggling, because in addition to those we love, there is God in whom we both believe, and when one is sincere and true, God never abandons those who have heart. He will lead me back to you, you will see. Of that I am sure. And the most beautiful day of my life will be the one when I will be able to embrace my little Moumoutte, never to lose her again.

  He signed it ton Schatsy, using the nickname she had given him, derived from Schatz, the German word for “darling.”

  For the next several days, Janine lived belowdecks, drenched in sadness. In the dark of the hold, she lay with Roland in her memories and tried to pretend he was lying beside her under the blanket. For the first time she noticed how long months of limited rations had outlined her ribs and how her abdomen dipped like a basin between the bony peaks of her hips. But the hunger she felt was only for him. She tried to call up his smell and his taste, the pulse of his heart, the warmth of his skin, the soul in his eyes. It was not enough. A baby, he’d warned, resisting desire that night in Marseille. But how she wished that a part of Roland were growing inside her, traveling with her, linking them always, their love enduring through all generations by way of their child. Why had she let him deny her that blessing? She lay for days with her knees curled up to her chest and allowed Alice to believe seasickness had paralyzed her, while Trudi attempted to lure her on deck. But Janine would not move. She lay there and wept, consoling herself with promises of love she engraved in her heart:

  We share a love that is strong enough to triumph over all obstacles.… You are now my fiancée; remember that when you see me again, it will be to become my wife, never to leave me again. Already I am entirely yours.…

  One night, as she lay in the dark and gave in to her tears, she jumped in alarm as the curtained partition, stretched across the width of the hold, suddenly opened next to her head. She found herself staring into the shining eyes and ebony face of a Senegalese soldier whose bunk was behind hers. His gleaming teeth flashed a friendly smile in the night, and she was mortified that her noisy misery had been disturbing his rest. Gently, he reached an arm past the curtain and placed an apple next to her cheek. “Ne pleurez plus,” he urged her. Don’t cry anymore. “You must eat and get up. Things will work out.” Before the end of the week, the chivalrous soldier would give her a thin metal ring wrapped inside a note asking her to become his wife.

  The Lipari traveled along the coasts of France and Spain and past Barcelona before turning south to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Without incident, it reached North Africa and stopped in Algiers, but the refugees were not permitted to disembark. “We had to stay for two days on board the ship in the harbor, seeing the town not far away, and the crew coming and going,” Janine later wrote of the journey. “I thought that Moses must have had the same feelings as we had, when he could see but not enter the Promised Land, and when we arrived three days later at Oran, the same thing occurred. It was inhuman.

  “From Oran to Casablanca, our ship was accompanied by five little warships, which had to protect us,” she added. They studied the waves for signs of U-boats lurking under the water, and minesweepers scoured the oceans before them. “We practiced safety drills several times in case our ship should be attacked. I had waited to see the famous Straits of Gibraltar, but the sea was very rough, and long before we reached that place, I felt more sick than ever and could not leave my bed.”

  Another night, asleep in the lower berth of the bunk beside Janine’s, Alice woke up and shrieked, as a set of false teeth fell from above, landing square on her face.

  “Mes dents, mes dents! Qui a volé mes dents?” Who stole my teeth? their owner demanded, scrambling down to search Alice’s berth for the teeth she had dropped. The woman’s voice was indignant, no theft beyond imagining now.

  “Gott im Himmel!” Alice exclaimed, her heart racing, after her bunk mate had climbed back to bed. “Those teeth landed right on my nose! That scared me to death!”

  “Why? Did they bite you?” Janine inquired, her anger inspiring a joke that surprised even her by making her giggle. It was the first spark of life to enter her voice since she’d boarded the ship. Yet as silence descended again in the hold, Janine lay awake in the groaning darkness and wished she could take back the words that now seemed unkind. She was acutely aware of the rustle and sighs, the breathing and snores of all the people, her mother among them, trying their best to escape into the illusion of dreams as they maneuvered through the fears of the night.

  The following morning, Janine ventured on deck and started to meet a few fellow passengers, but still she spent most of her time staring at two tiny pictures of Roland pasted inside a three-inch, blue spiral notebook that substituted as a new autograph book. The first was a formal portrait, Roland in a suit, white shirt, and striped tie, with his glossy, thick hair slicked back from his forehead and a very solemn look on his face. The handwritten entry on the opposing page was undated:

  La soeur The sister

  L’amie The friend

  La tendresse The tenderness

  L’amour The love

  Toutes sont parfaites en toi All are perfect in you

  Et je ne sais laquelle aimer le plus And I do not know which to love most

  The next page offered an informal snapshot of him, grinning shyly and wearing his coat, standing along the banks of the Rhône in Lyon, a bridge in the background. Roland had written the message accompanying this picture just the day before she sailed from Marseille, when she objected to his having termed her a sister and friend in his earlier entry. She needed far more romance than that to take away with her, and he complied:

  Roland’s first entry in Janine’s little bl
ue autograph book

  Roland’s second entry, written the day before Janine’s departure, pledges lifelong love.

  To erase that which I told you one day when I did not yet dare pledge my love, I ask you here to preserve our love intact until the happy day when you will be able to become my companion for life.

  Before leaving the ship, another young man, having noticed her devoted attention to her little blue book, asked to inscribe a message himself: “For the day when your sad blues have been drowned, I dedicate to you this little word.” At the top of his page, he had pasted half a French postage stamp that showed the face of a girl gazing into the distance, with a single word over her head: “Espoir.” Hope.

  “We would have liked to stay at least a week at Casablanca and see this town so famous in France for its beauty,” Janine would later write of her trip, practicing English as a student in Cuba. “Instead of this, we had to leave our ship at four-o’clock, just cross the wharf and go on board the San Thomé, which had arrived the same day from Portugal.”

  The Joint’s Lisbon office had chartered the San Thomé, like others before it, in neutral Portugal, the only country that still had available ships. The agency had to guarantee payment for filling each berth and was contractually obliged to pay for the trip in full before the ship left Morocco. It paid half when the San Thomé set out on the voyage with some 110 refugees embarking in Lisbon, and the balance before it left Casablanca, where 448 passengers boarded. There, in addition to the Lipari travelers, it had taken on passengers from the Ville d’Oran, a cramped freighter for animals that had carried refugees, along with more than one hundred sheep, across the Mediterranean from Marseille eight days ahead of the Lipari’s sailing.

  Some of the Ville d’Oran group, interned in Casablanca while they waited for the San Thomé to arrive, powerlessly watched their visas expire and were separated from family members with still-valid papers who had to continue the journey without them. Those left behind could not renew their visas in Morocco, and as they stood on the docks tearfully waving farewell, no one could say what would happen to them. It seemed all too likely that they would be sent back to France with almost no chance of escaping again.

  Jewish relief agencies paid the Portuguese approximately $400 per adult passenger and half fare for children, a total for the ship as a whole of $192,607 (the equivalent of well over $2.6 million today). At the HICEM office atop the rue de Paradis in Marseille, a staff of seventy-eight people had helped secure visas and fix travel arrangements. By the end of that month, the Joint would report that together with HICEM, from January 1941 to May 1942, they had helped almost eight thousand refugees get out of France. That November, after the Germans invaded Marseille, the Nazis would transform HICEM’s villa, turning a haven of hope into a house of torture for hundreds of Jews and Resistance fighters whose only escape would be death.

  The refugees who managed to board the San Thomé constituted Babel afloat—Germans, Austrians, French, Poles, Dutch, Belgians, Czechoslovaks, Russians, Latvians, Luxembourgers, Bolivians, Romanians, Yugoslavs, Spaniards, and Swiss—though records would list many others as “stateless,” aliens officially stripped of citizenship. Most were Jews who had been targeted for deportation and all that implied, but there were also those who had volunteered with the French Foreign Legion during the war, only to be denied permission to reenter France after it fell.

  There were non-Jewish German political refugees fleeing the Reich, as well as a contingent of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Volunteers from dozens of countries, they had joined the International Brigades on the Republican side six years before, unsuccessfully battling the Fascists in Spain. Many of them were scheduled to leave the ship in Veracruz, the San Thomé’s next port of call on the way to Havana.

  Also on board, among a coterie of artists and intellectuals, was a forceful woman reputed to be the daughter of the late Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). There was a Russian sculptor who came close to sparking a fistfight with Sigmar, a most unlikely brawler, when he suggested that Janine might agree to pass the time modeling in the nude for him because his wife had watched her undress in the hold and reported she had a very fine figure. There was a Viennese actress who taught Janine about the transformative magic of makeup and light, a Spanish aesthetics professor and poet with a nobleman’s profile, and a firebrand German Jewish communist who would return to Germany after the war with lofty ideals for rebuilding the nation.

  In short, it was an unlikely assortment of careworn souls who met traversing the oceans of war, all cut adrift from their past social circles and thus free to interact with each other in a circumscribed time and place that cast them as equals. Money alone was no passport to safety, nor was its absence a bar to making the voyage. As far as the Jews were concerned, the Joint Distribution Committee and HICEM raised funds through philanthropy and from refugees’ families abroad to ensure that no one who held appropriate visas would be denied rescue solely because he or she could not pay for a ticket.

  Though the San Thomé had been built as a freighter, the passengers’ comfort had not been ignored. There were lounge chairs on deck, and Portuguese waitresses served food more ample and varied than most of the passengers remembered enjoying in years: bread, milk, sugar, coffee, and meat—even the basics were luxuries to them. There were a few sinks and limited makeshift toilet facilities, generally clogged. But there were also large laundry basins set out on deck, and groups were welcome to make use of the lifeboats to gather in private. As the days wore on and people began to know one another, a Frenchman carried an old fur bedspread up on the deck. He invited other young people to stretch out with him under the stars on “la pelouse de mes ancêtres,” his ancestors’ lawn, as he charmingly called it, almost as if he could claim a new home, sacred space, wherever he laid it. The ocean itself was eerily empty, never another ship within view, as danger and cost discouraged most vessels from making the voyage.

  At least compared to the Lipari, Janine found conditions on the San Thomé a happy surprise:

  The new ship was very comfortable, white and clean, five o’clock tea was served, flowers stand on the tables, the holds in which we had to sleep were white, the beds were of white wood, the straw-mats covered with white sheets, and although we had no saloon [salon] in which to spend our days, at least we had some chairs on deck, which in some places was covered. We had become very modest during our voyage, so that these things, which we would have disdained before, now really enjoyed us.

  But this joy swept away. As the ship was very small and we were almost 600 persons on board, it was impossible to be even one moment alone. Moreover, being no more accustomed to have such rich food, so many butter and grease, in a few days many of us felt very ill. People began to quarrel, one day for a chair, the next day for a spoon; but we still were not on the end of our endurances. The more we approached the South, the more we began to feel the heat. We were obliged to spend our days on deck, exposed the whole day to the sun and during the night sleeping just under the engines, we nearly couldn’t support the heat. It was terrible. Moreover, we couldn’t extinguish the light during the whole night for the case of accident, and the noise of the engines disturbed us very much. So we decided to make our beds on the deck, an idea that did not work out very well. The nights were so humid and cool that at once we caught very bad colds. Moreover, the deck was cleaned every morning at 5 o’clock so we were obliged to get up early. But although this solution was not very fine, we liked it better than to sleep in the cave.

  Finally after two weeks, we sighted land, which the captain told us was Jamaica, where we had to leave the ship and spend three days in a camp. Before we could land the ship was inspected and of course the travelers also. From the time we had left Marseille this was the first part of the journey that we could enjoy. It was a wonderful day, the sun was just rising behind the hills forming the backbone of the little island of Jamaica. It was the most marvelous mo
ment in our trip. Our ship quietly entered the harbor of Kingston backed by the Blue Mountains, and not far away we already could see the little houses of the town. We all were very glad to see land again and how beautiful it was—we almost forgot that we had still three weeks more to travel before we could arrive at our destination.

  Janine stood enjoying the sight of the colorful colonial harbor as the San Thomé drew into Kingston, when Sigmar caught her off guard by grabbing her chin to study her face.

  “The British are very conservative,” he snapped, his face white and taut in spite of the weeks they had spent in the sun. “Lipstick will give them the wrong impression of you. Take my handkerchief and wipe it off immediately.”

  Who could foresee how his family’s virtue and value now would be judged as they landed on this Caribbean isle? He scarcely knew who he was anymore. In vain he pawed at his pocket for a cigar. Beneath him, native Jamaicans bent in the sun to secure the San Thomé’s ropes to the cleats on the quay, and British officers carrying clipboards talked with the captain. Warily they eyed the hundreds of refugees amassed on deck in somber woolens and dark hats that advertised their foreignness. It was the officers’ unpleasant duty on this Easter Sunday, April 5, 1942, to explain to the stressed and weary passengers that they would have to debark and be moved to a camp about a half hour away so their credentials and baggage could be inspected. The British were worried that German spies might have infiltrated these newest arrivals and needed adequate time to clear the ship for traveling onward.