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

by Leslie Maitland

Perhaps Janine had passed their guest on the sidewalk? Sigmar asked. His name was Sokoloff, the brother of Herbert’s wife, Estelle. As promised back when Herbert first pushed the idea of refuge in Cuba, Mr. Sokoloff was willing to use his official connections to help speed up their American visas. But his conversation left Sigmar outraged. He was shocked that their guest, whose wedding ring was plain on his finger, had shamelessly sat at their table over coffee and cake, extolling his girlfriend.

  “ ‘My amie is beautiful,’ ” Sigmar quoted him, recalling that Sokoloff had used the French word for a female friend. “I’ll help you get to my amie. She’s not far from here. You’ll spend a few days, and then you’ll move on to New York.” But could Sokoloff really imagine that Sigmar—no matter how impatient he was to get to the United States—would coolly condone such an illicit liaison? That Sigmar would knowingly take his own wife and daughters to be houseguests of a married man’s mistress? It was simply verrückt. Crazy.

  “I’d prefer to stay right here in Havana than have to lie to Herbert and Estelle when we get to New York,” Sigmar fumed. “What in God’s name could the man have been thinking, to come here and brag about his mistress to us? Unbelievable chutzpah! And then to suggest we pay her a visit!”

  Janine listened in silence, then broke into giggles.

  “This is funny to you? You are laughing at me?” Sigmar attempted to summon the bulging-eyed glare that proved so threatening when his children were young.

  “Papa, I think you’re mixing up your English and French,” she more gently suggested. “M-I-A-M-I.” She pronounced the word slowly. “Miami, not mon amie. Miami, Florida. It sounds like your Mr. Sokoloff is arranging for us to leave for the States!”

  On July 13, 1943, Margaret L. Hannan, principal of St. George’s School, wrote and officially stamped a letter that listed the courses Janine had taken, with the superior grades she achieved, and recommended her as college material:

  Her progress in English was remarkable, yet her work showed that she possessed knowledge far in advance of her ability to express that knowledge in what was to her a new language. She was tested by examinations of the standard of New York College Entrance Examinations and gained credits in Medieval History (91%), French 3 years (98%), Spanish 4 years (94%). Her English work was very good, but she still needs practice.

  We feel sure that as soon as Janine has more practice in the English language, she will find no difficulty in qualifying for the university of her choice.

  Janine proved a good “mixer” in school, and took part in the swimming competitions for which the school entered.

  Her conduct throughout has been excellent. We wish her all success.

  Miss Hannan peered above the rimless glasses that always perched near the end of her nose as she extended the letter, shook Janine’s hand, and inquired into the family’s plans. “We are all very sorry to see you go,” she said. “But you must promise me one thing: when you get to the States, please don’t ruin all the work that we’ve done by picking up that thoroughly dreadful American English!”

  Six days later, the vice-consul of the United States signed and approved Sigmar’s affidavit in support of the family’s immigration visas. Norbert, though, decided to remain in Havana. He persuaded his parents that he was better off working there than being drafted into the American Army and shipped back to Europe. His experience in the French Foreign Legion had sharply curtailed his previous zest for fighting the Germans. Knowing Norbert, Sigmar and Alice also suspected the influence of a saucy Cuban señorita, but since they could not dispute that he was safe and content with life in Havana, they sadly relented to his staying behind.

  On his affidavit, Sigmar was obliged once again to define himself as a refugee: “I was born on December 29, 1880, at Ihringen, Germany. I am a citizen of no country, formerly Germany,” he stated. “I am unable to obtain from the authorities of the government to which I owe (or owed) allegiance a passport valid for travel to the United States.”

  Photos of Sigmar, Alice, and the girls were affixed to the form, and each of them signed, Janine writing her name as Johanna Dora Gunzburger, thus ending her travels under almost the same name as she began them in Freiburg.

  On August 10, they left for Miami. Before Janine and Trudi nervously boarded the plane for the first flight of their lives, Norbert kissed them on both cheeks and rewarded them with his most disarming grin. Then he enfolded both his sisters in his arms, and with their three heads huddled together, he gave them a little parting guidance. The musky scent of his favorite cologne found its way to their hearts as they felt the warmth of his words in their ears: “Before you take off, you mustn’t forget to check for the parachutes under your seats,” he counseled. “You’ll definitely need them in case you have to bail out.”

  Sigmar’s affidavit of July 19, 1943, for use in lieu of a passport for the family’s travel from Cuba to the United States

  This time there was no glint of a misplaced diamond to draw their attention to his mischievous eyes, and so they panicked to find their parachutes missing when they got on the plane and made fools of themselves. And that was not the only surprise of their journey.

  The two sisters landed at the Florida airport proudly wearing identical light blue gabardine suits, with slim, straight skirts and mandarin collars. Just as Alice had done in leaving Freiburg and Lyon, she had insisted that each of her daughters have one new traveling outfit, custom made for arriving in style, first impressions being so very important. Both of her girls wore their hair with parts on the left and curls to their shoulders. And while Trudi’s hair was a little bit lighter and she had brown eyes and the faintest dusting of Alice’s freckles, and Janine had blue eyes and broader shoulders, they might very easily have been taken for twins, dressed as they were in the same clothes, wearing the same bright smiles of anticipation.

  “Was werden da die Leute sagen?” What will the people say when they see you? Sigmar had playfully asked when they dressed for their trip, just as he had when they donned their Passover best as children in Freiburg. But to their dismay, as they walked in their new finery through the Miami airport, the American people said nothing at all. No whistles, no winks, no clicks of the tongue, no appreciative comments from men who rushed by, which, after more than a year in Cuba, came as a shock.

  “I’m sorry to tell you I think we left something important behind in Havana,” Trudi observed to her sister. “And I don’t mean Norbert.”

  “What’s that?” Janine stopped and put down her suitcase. In fear, she surveyed the terrain of the past, scarred by losses, and she braced herself for an additional one, as yet unmarked.

  “Our looks,” Trudi grimly replied.

  SEVENTEEN

  HÔTEL TERMINUS

  ALL OF ROLAND’S INNATE RESOLVE to avoid any type of regimentation could not ward off the Vichy government’s summons in April 1942 to don the khaki shirt, dark green tie, and matching beret of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, or worksites for youth, and fight for his country by chopping wood to make charcoal. Aiming to stiffen the backbones of France’s young men through duty in quasi-military units organized after the army had fallen, the Chantiers established hundreds of campsites in the Unoccupied Zone and told Roland to report to Rumilly in the lush alpine woods of the Haute-Savoie near the Swiss border.

  Yet so sure was he of worming his way through a loophole that he traveled to camp on the day of induction, just a few weeks after Janine left Lyon, carrying only a toothbrush. Indeed, a painful hernia resulting from his appendectomy the previous summer sufficed to win him a two-month reprieve, and he was sent home after just one night with instructions to go for hernia surgery—promptly ignored. Two months later he was called up again. This time, he won no sympathy from Vichy officials bent on improving the virtue, vigor, and virile demeanor of the country’s young men so as to combat what Marshal Pétain denounced as a “decadent” culture and blamed for the ignominy of France’s condition.

  “Eh, eh, no dice.” The
induction officer wagged a rigid government finger when Roland invoked the pain in his gut the second time he was summoned to spend eight hard months in a forest learning the discipline of following orders. Like untold thousands of draft-age young men, he would be armed with an ax, a pick, and a shovel and be forced through the monotony of physical labor to embrace the patriotism of Vichy’s National Revolution. If the Chantiers, while modeled on scouting, managed to harden a cadre of men with the potential of one day forming a new French army, Vichy officials quietly agreed, that would also be a result to be valued.

  For Roland, life could have been worse. In Alsace, both men and women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five had for more than a year been forced into the Reich Labor Service, and later that summer, the region’s young men would be drafted into Germany’s armies. It was also that June, in a radio speech expressing his hope to see Germany triumph in Europe, that Prime Minister Laval announced a deal he made with the Reich to send three French workers over the Rhine to factory jobs for every French prisoner of war the Germans released. Under the terms of this purported relief plan, called la Relève, Laval aimed to minimize the political damage of 1.5 million French soldiers still being held in Germany’s prisons, despite Vichy’s groveling collaboration with Hitler. Even so, the three-to-one ratio meant that 4.5 million French workers would have to volunteer to serve in Germany in order to bring all the prisoners home.

  That July, among new restrictions, Pétain’s government officially excluded Jews from the dubious pleasures of the Chantiers. This allowed Roger to stay in Lyon, where a record outpouring of anti-Vichy protesters took to the streets on Bastille Day. Roland, however, knew nothing about this public unrest, with no radio or newspapers at the camp, which was expressly sited to be cut off from the world and the lure of insurgent political action. Rather, days started and ended with nationalistic flag ceremonies and loyal pledges of faith in their leaders. In the snow-topped, craggy face of Mont Blanc, a place naturally suited to humbling the soul and pointing one’s efforts to loftiest purpose, Roland was exhorted to work for the glory of God, Pétain, and country. This he would do by bending his back in the collection of wood on the Semnoz Mountains and by learning to value such simple joys as being marched down the slopes, past the occasional remote chalet or docile herd of grazing cattle, for the once-weekly treat of taking a shower.

  Within a matter of weeks, glory or no, it was obvious to Roland that he had the wrong job. The camp orderly’s lot seemed far more appealing: to provide basic first aid for accident cases, to look after the sick in the camp, and to escort those in need of professional medical treatment down the mountain to visit the doctor who ran an infirmary based in a farmhouse. “Il faut développer des choses,” one must develop things, he ruminated over a plan. And so, reporting sick on account of his hernia, he pursued a friendship with the camp doctor and managed to shift to the post he wanted. Ultimately, he even persuaded the doctor to send him to the hospital in the picturesque lakeside town of Annecy for hernia surgery at government cost, on government time. There, lying alone and helpless in bed, recalling the sweetness of weeks when Janine had nursed him to health through her love, he would cower beneath the heart-stopping drone of British bombers that cut through the night on their way south to bomb the Italians.

  The following March, Roland was released from his tedious tour of forestry duty. By then, Hitler had seized full control of France, and at a moment when no one was safe from the eye of suspicion, on December 27, 1943, the Germans demanded the ouster of the French general who had launched the Chantiers. Within days, the general was thrown into prison—first in Germany, then Austria—accused of lending support to the growing Resistance. That spring the Germans ordered the Chantiers disbanded. Then they harnessed the unarmed scouts to forced-labor battalions tasked with building the Atlantikwall, a massive system of bunkers and minefields stretching from Norway to the French-Spanish border, to block any northern Allied invasion.

  With the second German occupation of Lyon in November 1942, the Gestapo set up headquarters in the swank Hôtel Terminus at the gare de Perrache, the railway station near the southern end of the Presqu’île. From there they could keep a close eye on the network of trains that crisscrossed France. In this 1906 art nouveau jewel—a decorative wonder of elaborate wood paneling and wrought iron, stained glass, sculpture, and neo-Impressionist murals by award-winning artists—Klaus Barbie, notorious as the Butcher of Lyon, established his offices upon arriving in town to head the Gestapo. On the fifth floor of the lovely hotel, while clerical workers went about their business as usual, he and his henchmen pursued the cruel interrogations of Resistance fighters and Jews, for which Barbie would face criminal charges more than four decades later.

  Yet in the same hotel, on a different floor, valiant members of the Resistance burrowed into the French railway system and secretly worked to sabotage the aims of the Reich. And here, naïvely blind to the dangers swirling around them, Roger Dreyfus and Roland Arcieri eagerly accepted employment with the French railroad, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français—for Roger to avoid being deported to whatever mysterious eastward destination that meant for a Jew, for Roland to evade being forced to fight or toil for the Germans.

  Roland had been shocked to discover upon his return from the mountains that Germany’s relentless demands for hundreds of thousands of added French workers now placed him directly in line to be called. Unable to fend off Germany’s soaring manpower demands, Laval had announced a compulsory program, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, requiring all French men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five to register for Reich employment. Even worse for Roland, Laval ordered all of those born between 1920 and 1922 to surrender immediately for two-year terms of forced German labor. Only those in a few essential job categories were exempted, among them miners, agricultural workers, police, and railway employees.

  With his birth date of December 27, 1919, Roger slid out of the category of conscripted workers by the slimmest margin of only five days. But facing extra risk as a Jew and ousted for the same reason from his science studies at the university, he was quick to accept when a friend who worked as a railroad engineer found him a job as a Dolmetscher or interpreter in the offices based at the Hôtel Terminus. When Roland returned from the Chantiers that spring of 1943, Roger arranged the same post for him. At a hub where 3.5 million travelers would pass that year, the two young Alsatians were put to work translating communications between French and German railway officials.

  The railway system, or SNCF, nationalized in 1937, became an unparalleled focus of the Resistance as the Germans forced it to transport troops, munitions, goods, conscripted French workers, and Jews condemned to death in the camps. Clandestine fighters in the Resistance who worked with the railroad tried to delay or derail trains and slipped information on train schedules to saboteurs who set bombs on the tracks to blow up locomotives. They relied on trains to aid the escape of those hunted by Nazis, and to deliver letters, contraband, and underground newspapers. Reich officials were well aware that French railway workers engaged in sabotage and threatened the death penalty for any involved. Still, in the end, the SNCF reported that from the time of France’s defeat in June 1940 to July 1944, there were 249 derailments achieved by resisters in the region of Lyon and thousands in other parts of the country.

  Even after Resistance leader Jean Moulin was betrayed, arrested, and murdered that summer of 1943, the tide of defiance continued to mount. Ragged bands of self-styled saboteurs or guerrilla fighters, forming the Maquis in the countryside or the more urban Franc-Tireur Partisans in Lyon and elsewhere, attracted increasing numbers of volunteers to fight the Germans instead of submitting to work as their slaves. As evidence of their secret warfare, in August, over the course of one night, Roland was obliged to translate twenty-eight cables from French into German, all reporting sabotage somewhere on the lines. Hour after hour, all through his shift, he nervously faced the Germans at Lyon-Perrac
he, angry as hornets, as he brought them fresh accounts of railroad subversion.

  Every day was tainted by terror of being found out, Roland as Alsatian, Roger as a Jew. In case he needed to disappear quickly, Roland procured a set of false identification papers listing a birthplace outside of Alsace that defined him as unequivocally French. His landlady, a civil servant with disdain for Vichy and—more important—valuable access to government forms, fashioned a safer alternate identity for him. With humor, the name that she chose for the handsome young man whose girlfriend had fled and left him alone was Jean Moine, or John the Monk.

  But even false identity papers could not provide sufficient protection on the Sunday afternoon in the fall when Roger’s girlfriend appeared in panic at their door to tell Roland that the Gestapo had come in search of their friend. They had ransacked her room and grilled her with questions, and she’d told them she thought Roger had gone out of town. He had, in fact, boarded a train the previous day on one of his regular trips to the country to visit his parents and brother, waiting out the war in seclusion; less benignly, he would also buy food on the farms to resell on Lyon’s black market. With so many types of employment now blocked to Jews, and with his father, unlike Roland’s, barred from resuming his prewar business in Alsace, Roger’s petty black marketeering provided the family with crucial income. Despite Roland’s warnings, Roger refused to give up his outlawed trade, and he went so far as to sell to the Germans, discounting the threat of their turning against him. Roger was due back that same afternoon, and Roland rushed to the station to warn him not to come home to the room they shared or to go to any other habitual haunt where the Gestapo might be planning to trap him.

  In the waiting room, Roland paced the floor, compulsively checking and rechecking his watch. Then, checking himself, he decided it best to appear more relaxed and assured. He waved to the occasional coworker who spotted him there on a day he wasn’t scheduled for duty. Still, he made no attempt to invite conversation that might distract him from what he needed to do. The minutes crawled by in a torment of worry. And little by little, as Roland considered why the Gestapo had come for Roger, he felt suddenly certain that he must be a target as well. For who could say whether his friend had been sought because he was Jewish, Alsatian, a minor-league black marketeer, or suspected in some subversive scheme to aid the Resistance through work with the railroad? Based on his own circumcised member and any contraband found in their room, whatever pretext the Gestapo employed for seeking Roger’s arrest might just as well apply to him too!