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

by Leslie Maitland

  After Lyon’s liberation, Maurice came south to visit his in-laws, and seeing him shattered, Marie took it as her duty to go back to the city and care for him. But soon she, too, was seduced by whispering devils that clamored around them, selling unfounded hope. Marie shared her sorrow across the Atlantic, sending her brother Sigmar an anguished series of densely written postcards and letters. Despair filled her pages and spiraled the edges in a barely legible scrawl. She begged him to help obtain information, possibly through the American Red Cross, and poured out her message of pain many times over:

  You have surely learned of our great and terrible tragedy. My dear Mimi, the three children, and my poor Bella were arrested on 29 October 43. We have had no news of them since Drancy. They are surely in Poland or in Upper Silesia. What I suffer, you can believe, is more than terrible because we don’t know where our poor children are.… One despairs above all at a time when it is so cold. Do you think perhaps Herbert can do something? I have already written to him.… If only one knew where they were. Nothing now for more than a year! It’s totally hopeless. There is such misery in the world.

  It will truly be the most sacred of moments when the good Lord will liberate them. Maurice suffers horribly. I cannot speak. God give us strength! How often I think of my dear Sigmar who wanted to take us away with him! How right you were to leave! If only God will protect our dear deported ones and preserve them in health. My time is filled with prayers that I hope God will hear. Write to me. Think of me. I kiss you with my whole heart. Your sad sister, Marie.

  Again and again, she wrote to Sigmar seeking advice and describing Maurice’s frantic attempts to search for their loved ones, as he continued to do until after the war, when all five names turned up in the lists of the dead. Only then did he learn that his wife, three children, and Bella were deported on Convoy Number 62 that pulled away from Bobigny station near Drancy just before noon on November 20, 1943. The transport approved in Berlin by Adolf Eichmann had included one thousand two hundred Jews crammed into freight cars. Among the other prisoners was Roland’s friend Roger Dreyfus; also among them was Jacques Helbronner, widely known as “the Marshal’s Jew” for his friendship with Pétain, along with his wife, Jeanne; another was Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy, the granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus. Of no known relation to Roger, Madeleine had been arrested in Toulouse in early November on charges of working for the Resistance.

  The train crossed the border north of Alsace on a journey that ended at Auschwitz in Poland, missing 19 prisoners who had managed a daring escape on the first night of travel. In an icy rain, on a platform patrolled by SS guards with dogs, the remaining 1,181 prisoners were separated from their belongings. Quickly selected for immediate death were 895 deportees, with the remaining 241 men and 45 women assigned to hard labor. Of those, all but 29 men and 2 women from Convoy Number 62 would perish before the end of the war.

  In the fall of 1944, Norbert left Cuba to come to the United States to be with the family at Sigmar’s sixty-fourth birthday at the end of December. But only weeks after his arrival, as he’d predicted, he was drafted into the American Army. Dispatched to Camp Blanding in Florida for basic training with an infantry unit, he was then assigned to an intelligence branch that valued his fluency in French and German. On the day in late April 1945 when Norbert shipped out, Janine and Trudi saw him off at the pier on Staten Island. True to form, he railed against leaving his latest girlfriend, this one an American, but any fears of going back to war were quickly assuaged by his enormous good fortune of debarking in Europe on May 8, the very day the Germans surrendered.

  Norbert in his American army uniform, stationed in Germany after the war

  It had only been a matter of days since the arrest of Pétain, the execution of Italy’s Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and the suicide, in his Berlin bunker on the last day of April, of a crazed Adolf Hitler. He had skirted defeat and certain capture by choosing to shoot himself in the mouth. With his last written words, the leader who plotted a Thousand Year Reich had blamed the Jews for provoking the war, causing millions of deaths and appalling destruction. Aides found the Führer’s mangled corpse beside the slumped form of his poisoned bride, Eva Braun, whom Hitler had finally married in the dark morning hours of the previous day. Then, in a macabre, self-prescribed Viking funeral—a wordless ceremony amid the roaring bombardment of Red Army shells—they were both laid to rest in a bed of flames.

  Never one to miss a party, Norbert arrived right in time for the great jubilation, free French kisses, and small opportunities for silent revenge. And the following fall, when a few days’ leave gave him the chance to strut through Freiburg, resplendent in his American uniform, and then to visit Lyon, a friend told him that Roland was still there, living alone now in a one-room apartment. When they met, Roland recounted the trials of the past three years: how he had narrowly escaped arrest by the Milice, dodged bullets and bombings in the liberation, and served with the Allies in a revived French Army during the months between the rescue of Lyon and final triumph over the Germans. Filling a low-level clerical job with a tank regiment at a barracks in Lyon, he had been tasked with tracking food and supplies for the troops in his unit. At that point, he still knew nothing about Roger’s murder.

  In the champagne exuberance of victory, the madcap gaiety sweeping the country, the two young men—Norbert twenty-four, Roland twenty-five—celebrated an end to the terror.

  “You can’t walk on one leg!” Roland proclaimed after they downed a first drink together. Concurring in the need for a second round, they jovially continued from there.

  After that meeting, Norbert fired off a devastatingly harsh letter to Janine, defaming Roland and insisting that she break off with him. What was his motive? Perhaps Norbert had already discovered the blond, German Protestant girl he would later fight his parents to marry and wanted to deflect Janine from upsetting them by also choosing a non-Jewish partner. Perhaps Sigmar had influenced Norbert’s message to her. Or maybe Norbert was merely being protective, judging Roland unworthy to wed his sister. These questions persist, unanswered. And while the truth of Norbert’s damning report was never confirmed, there can be no doubt as to the brutal hurt it inflicted. No bomb could have wreaked greater damage in assaulting Janine’s most cherished dreams for the future.

  In years to come, however, Janine managed to expunge this letter from her memory entirely. She therefore never blamed Norbert for playing a role in her decision against returning to France, which she always regretted. Instead, she ever after condemned herself for permitting her fears to overpower the resolve of her love. Norbert’s cruel letter remained hidden away in a neglected archive tucked in a closet, completely forgotten in what Janine persisted in calling, despite her marriage, her “Old Maid Box.” Things saved but too painful to open. It was almost as if, not having married Roland, like a reclusive, ill-fated Victorian maiden, she would preserve the fragments of her one true romance tenderly wrapped in ribbons and cobwebs.

  All in one paragraph, typed in French in an italic font on blue airmail paper, Norbert’s letter was written from Freiburg on November 16, 1945. The voluble, pompous gush of his words and the paternalistic pose that he strikes are fully his own, along with the switches to capital letters. But my translation does not reflect the numerous French grammatical errors that add to the sense of its having been written with the drunken bravado of a soldier on leave, a soldier with a conquering army, puffing his chest in a beaten country where his memory of persecution was raw.

  My dear sister Janine,

  I have just received your letter of 3 November 1945 and I am hurrying to respond by return mail. You tell me that you believe me sufficiently intelligent to understand that your relationship with Roland is not a flirtation but something more serious. Then you say that you think me senseless, because I have paid little attention to this affair. Well, my dear, I believe rather that it is because I do have sense that I have acted in this manner. I know you, and I know your thoughts, and I
therefore had no intention of making you angry by giving you my ideas on this subject. I remember, however, having made allusion to the fact that while everyone else in the world tries to establish himself to become something, Roland is still the eternal student. But perhaps I have overestimated your intelligence, and you did not understand what I was trying to say. I will therefore tell you again now in French. Roland is a good guy, and I would be delighted to have him as a pal to share a good time. But Roland does not have two cents, and still he spends his time in cafés, in restaurants, in bars, and is the man known on the rue de la République to many women, while he pretends to love only you. Visiting for just a few days, I have wanted to preserve a friendship with him, and for that reason I have taken an absolutely neutral position with him where you are concerned. You probably know as well as I that for the moment, it will be impossible for him to go to America. I admit, however, that it would be absolutely possible for you to return to France. Therefore, here is the conclusion: IS YOUR LOVE FOR ROLAND GREAT ENOUGH FOR YOU TO ABANDON YOUR PARENTS? TO LEAVE THE USA AND RETURN TO A COUNTRY WHERE YOU KNOW NO ONE? TO RETURN TO A COUNTRY WHERE THOSE YOU DO KNOW WILL SCORN YOU? DO YOU WANT TO MARRY A MAN WITH WHOM YOU WILL STARVE? OH WELL, IN THIS CASE YOU HAVE MY BENEDICTION. Make your application, take the risk as to whether he will marry you or not, and you can rent yourselves a little attic room on the rue des Roses, and you will be happy. To be fair, I can even tell you that Roland appears to be interested in you, and I suppose that this is all that matters to you. What else would you like me to tell you? That we went out on the town together, that we had a great time, that we spent the night with two girls we picked up and brought to his room, that he’s had a girlfriend, that he has a terrible reputation, and that we only talked about you for 30 minutes? To give you a fuller picture, I can add that not only do I fail to realize that you are no longer a child and that this relationship is not a simple flirtation, but I can assure you, and this is my most sacred decision, that in the event you return to Europe and marry Roland, I WILL ONLY HAVE ONE SISTER, AND WITH YOUR HONEYMOON TRIP, YOU WILL SAIL OUT OF MY LIFE FOREVER.

  He closed the letter without signing his name, but with an expression in German modeled on the fictional Indian warrior Winnetou he had adored as a child, an absurdly imperious declaration that could have thundered only from an unassailably powerful chief with muscles rippling, hatchet gleaming, and feathers cascading over his shoulders:

  “Ich habe gesprochen.” I have spoken. “How!”

  Two years later, Janine would marry Leonard Maitland.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE LION AND MISS AMERICA

  THE MAN WHO WOULD BECOME my father was twenty-eight years old in October 1946 when his blunt and practical older sister, Mona, arranged for him to meet Janine on a blind date in New York. Janine, five years younger, was working in a Madison Avenue endocrinologist’s office, where Mona arrived as a patient and instantly noticed the doctor’s lovely assistant.

  “What a shame she’s a shiksa. If she were only Jewish, I’d fix her up with my brother,” Mona remarked to the doctor and nodded toward Janine, who stood in the hallway dressed in white. “He’s a cross between Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant. It’s only because he’s been away in the war that he’s still unattached.” Leery of matchmaking schemes, Janine glared at the doctor to keep silent, but he cannily lured her into the open.

  “Oh well, she’s meshuga, anyway,” Dr. Morton replied. The Yiddish word for “crazy,” provoked just the reaction he anticipated.

  Leonard Laurence Maitland

  “Why would you say that?” Janine blurted out, her rubber-soled nursing shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor as she plunged back into the examining room. “Have I given you reason to say that about me?”

  Mona turned in surprise. “Meshuga? If she’s really a shiksa, how did she just understand what you said?”

  “I never said she wasn’t Jewish.” Dr. Morton chuckled in self-satisfaction. “You did.”

  Leonard Maitland called Janine that same day and insisted on coming to see her that evening. And although she had dreaded meeting a stranger, Janine needed only one glance at the man at her door to be thankful that being revealed as a Jew finally managed to work in her favor. Her only problem that evening as they sat and talked in the living room proved to be getting Trudi to leave them alone because, as Mona had promised, her new date was entrancingly, movie star handsome. Well over six feet tall with glossy black hair, a strong cleft chin, arresting blue eyes, and a deep, mellifluous voice, he had a ruggedly masculine demeanor. Janine mistook for confidence his brash attempts to be seductively charming. In time, his true nature would reveal itself as less self-assured, if all the more inscrutable.

  About that young man who ardently courted Janine I myself would learn rather little. For while my childhood was wrapped in a tapestry woven from my mother’s riveting stories about her life and its perils in wartime and her star-crossed romance with Roland, my father was guarded about his past and his feelings. I know he had once aspired to write the great American novel, focusing on rail-riding hobos. That touring the South in search of a college football scholarship, he ran out of money and spent a hungry night in jail for stealing apples from an orchard. But I was seventeen before I discovered he had been married before, a youthful mistake he sought to keep hidden. And ironically—while my mother’s family had spent almost a decade dodging the Nazis in Europe, hiding in plain sight while never disguising their Jewish background—it was my father, the quintessential American, who changed his name by way of court order in 1941 to avoid anti-Semitism he feared would hinder career advancement. Prejudice limited options for American Jews of that period, and because he could readily pass as Christian and had little feeling for any religion, he discarded a name that made him a victim. He claimed to have found the name Maitland by throwing a dart at a map of the world on the wall of a bar where he was drinking with friends. It was a town to the north of Sydney, Australia, and he thought it had the right sound for the restricted domains of engineering and business he wanted to conquer.

  The name Maitland, actually Scottish, is thought to have found its way to Australia with a prisoner shipped to distant exile from Britain. Leonard never set foot in Australia—or Scotland—although he could jauntily mimic the accents of both, and quite a number of others as well. He was born in Manhattan on October 11, 1918, the son of a Russian Jew, Beresh Friedman, who had fled the pogroms and poverty of Eastern Europe after the 1905 Revolution. A self-reliant, humble, and taciturn man, Beresh initially struck out by himself for Argentina and then London, before trying to make a fresh start in the United States. He left Ellis Island renamed Bernard and went to work in New York as a tailor. It took some years before he had saved enough money to pay passage for his violet-eyed wife, Fanny, a baker’s daughter from a Polish shtetl, and their daughter Mona. Their only son was born in New York after the couple reunited, which accounted for Mona’s being eleven years older and inclined to take charge of how he was reared. She took credit for having gone on her own to the city registrar’s office to change the name her immigrant parents had given her brother: within days of his birth, she crossed out their choice, Louis, and dubbed him Leonard Laurence, which sounded more American to her.

  Len’s parents and sister: Bernard, Fanny, and three-year-old Mona Friedman in 1911

  Bathed by classical music on the radio, Bernard gave his days to constant labor. Yet he remained poor to the end of his long life, by which point, a widower for seventeen years, he had lost his eyesight to glaucoma and the strain of countless invisible stitches. He worked from the family’s ground-floor apartment on 84th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and exercised his political views through membership in the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish labor association with Socialist leanings. Appreciation counted for more than pay on a job, he maintained, and he fretted over custom-made clothing and the lesser challenges of alterations while barely charging enough to earn any profit.

&nb
sp; A loner, an atheist, and a privately bitter, cynical man, Bernard proudly recalled his glory days in the czar’s army, a sentimental view of his youth that his avowed socialism left undisturbed. In fact, ever after, that dusty Russian door to his past was the only portal through which one might lure him into discussion. In the arduous life that had followed for him, his keen intellect was always stymied by the conditions that forced him to sew for a living. The tailor vowed to chop off Len’s fingers before he would sanction his taking up scissors or thread, yet there was no risk of that. Father and son could not get along, the language of music being the only one they amiably shared. What little money Bernard ever spent on himself went for standing-room tickets in the dizzying topmost balcony of the Metropolitan Opera, and at home he would whistle an accompaniment as Len, a powerful bass, sang their favorite Italian arias. But Bernard cast a permanent shadow over their relationship with a sardonic prediction about his son’s future.

  “Hair will grow in the palm of my hand before you make anything of yourself!” Bernard habitually chided him. The Old World method of spurring a child to greater achievement rankled, and Leonard never forgot or forgave it, such that in the end, like an omen foretold by the blind Tiresias, my grandfather’s curse indirectly affected us all. Leonard’s own assessment of his success could never equal what he seemed to need to prove to his father, and as the years passed, resentment spawned cold criticism—of his father, himself, and then other people. Confronting his father’s limitless challenge, he assumed a combative stance in the world and could never quite put his anger behind him.