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

by Leslie Maitland

  Hours passed in the lobby, and I was drawn to investigate a stack of glossy brochures that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the company: “50 Years of Achievement and Partnership!… that is Eisen Glatt,” the cover said in German. Inside, a chronology traced the firm’s development from its “founding” by Albin and Alfons Glatt in 1938. Beside the list of dates that trumpeted the sprouting of new branches in several other German cities, a small sepia-toned photograph showed two men dressed in suits and ties, posing before the wooden warehouse in its early days. But whether the two men were Albin and Alfons or Sigmar and Heinrich was indeterminable to me. When Sissi studied the chronology, she leaped to her feet and began to pace the narrow waiting room in her high black boots befitting Prussian royalty, waving the brochure like evidence high above her head.

  “Gründung des Unternehmens!” she scoffed indignantly, reading the account of the supposed origins of the company. “But that was no founding! That was a takeover from a Jewish family!”

  With that, an inner door suddenly slammed open and Berthold Glatt came storming out. A man seemingly in his middle fifties, nattily attired, he was red faced and fuming. “Ich bin nicht interessiert!” he bellowed when Sissi tried to tell him that my sole intention there was journalistic. “Nicht interessiert!” Not interested. Not today, not tomorrow, not even in another year. “Never!” he exploded. “What right do you have to bring her here?” he barked at Sissi and jerked his head in my direction.

  “Nicht interessiert!” Sissi sputtered. Her face was drained and pale, and her lower lip was quivering. She thrust the Eisen Glatt brochure beneath his nose, and her finger stabbed the printed time line that purported to describe the founding of the company.

  With that, Berthold Glatt seized Sissi Walther by both elbows and marched her through the lobby and shoved her out the door, while the receptionist came scurrying from behind her counter to assist her boss by grabbing me. Neither had the temerity to tackle Michael, who was tall and buff in a loose-limbed sort of way that seemed to advertise his latent strength, and who was, at any rate, already moving toward the exit.

  That night I was agitated and excited to tell my parents what had happened, but when I called them from my hotel room, my mother’s news eclipsed my own: Mom said she feared the cancer had moved into Dad’s brain. And so I spent that night, too, sleepless and despondent, counting out the clanging bells that rang a mournful requiem. I hid my head beneath the pillows, but still the bells harassed me each half hour, demanding wakefulness to suffering. They echoed through the winding cobbled streets, across the valley and the foothills of the Schwarzwald, through the violet-tinted Vosges and the craggy Pyrenees, and over cold, wide waters to my parents’ home.

  The next day, I went with Walter to the Jewish cemetery on a hillside at the edge of nearby Ihringen, a former Nazi stronghold and the farming village where Sigmar had been born. One year earlier, visiting the little graveyard with my parents and my brother, we had found it locked, and Gary scaled its stucco walls in order to inspect the graves of Mom’s great-grandparents. At that point all was well, but the following August unknown vandals also made their way inside and under cloak of night smashed and desecrated almost all two hundred tombstones. The massive monuments, their inscriptions all in Hebrew, had been hacked off from their bases and lay in rows, faceup on the grass like gray-clad soldiers mowed down on a battlefield. Blue and red paint swastikas, SS markings, and mocking Stars of David were suppurating wounds on the broken corpselike tablets. Several of the oldest slabs had been reduced to cracked and crumbled mounds of marble. Amid the ruins, it was difficult to identify our family graves.

  Walter showed me a news article from the Badische Zeitung reporting there had been twenty-four attacks on Jewish cemeteries in Baden-Württemberg over the prior three years, with the one in Ihringen most destructive. But the German public rose in outrage: six thousand demonstrators flocked to the village to march in silent protest the Saturday after it occurred, and for several weeks that followed, visitors continued to arrive to deplore the desecration. On the day I went with Walter, the graveyard’s high iron gate, which town officials normally kept locked, had been opened for viewing and bore a notice jointly signed by the mayor and the minister of the local church:

  The Jewish cemetery has been defiled in the worst way by unknown culprits. We feel grief, indignation, and deep shame. Out of respect for the dead, we beg you, dear visitor, to enter the cemetery in reverence and to conduct your talks and discussions outside the cemetery.

  Walter and I moved with other solemn visitors among the broken monuments bearing family names once so prevalent on both sides of the Rhine. Established in 1810, the graveyard’s most recent tombstone was dated 1940, when the last of Baden’s Jews were rounded up for deportation. But the hatred that gave rise to centuries of persecution chased Jewish bones in Ihringen even into death, a curse they had escaped in the graveyard’s hallowed ground all throughout the Holocaust. Scrawled in red and green across the cemetery’s whitewashed wall were neo-Nazi threats, interspersed with swastikas:

  In 1990 vandals desecrated almost all two hundred grave sites in the small Jewish cemetery in Ihringen where Sigmar’s ancestors lay buried, including the Günzburger whose tombstone is pictured above. (photo credit 24.2)

  HE—KOMM DU JUDE—WIR FAHREN NACH DACHAU. Hey, come you Jew, we’re going to Dachau.

  JUDE VERREKKE! Croak, you Jew!

  JUDENSCHWEINE Jewish pigs

  Many of those who walked about the cemetery, shaking heads in sadness and disgust, were holding children’s hands and trying to turn the scene into a learning opportunity. Meanwhile, outside the gates, informal groups were clustering, exchanging reactions and debating how the government should respond. “They must immediately restore the cemetery as it was,” a woman was arguing with her husband, who vehemently disagreed.

  “My grandfather was in the Nazi Party in the beginning because they promised him a job,” he said when I asked if they would share their views. “But after Kristallnacht, he quit the party. They took him to Buchenwald, and he was killed. Today I see this place, and I think it must be kept like this to be a warning to young people who can be attracted to those old and sick ideas.”

  That day I dreaded more than ever the prison of my hotel room. So when Michael and Karla invited me to spend the night at Poststrasse 6, where they planned a dinner party bringing together all my Freiburg friends, I gratefully accepted. Guests included Michael’s chess mate Stefan, Walter and his wife Josefine, as well as Sissi. There was lively conversation over fresh Spargel and Riesling. Yet my thoughts kept sneaking to the past, with Alice and Sigmar presiding at their dinner table just floors below the place I sat, with the same gold October moon floating at the gabled rooftops, and the same Black Forest breeze rustling their curtains.

  Hours later, when the house was still and dark, I lay awake beneath the massive beams of the pointed attic roof. Now my thoughts insisted on returning to the other women who had faced their nighttime fears in this same house. My grandmother, Aunt Trudi, and my mother preparing to wander out into a foreign world. Tremulous Frau Stock, trying to embrace the future. The grieving widow Loewy and helpless Fräulein Ellenbogen, both aroused at daybreak on a holiday exactly fifty years before.

  Through an open window I heard the heavy wooden door open on the street and then bang shut, and there were footsteps on the staircase: I imagined the terror of SS men in jackboots storming to the attic to seize us all. It was just as Mom had told me of her close escape onto a rooftop in Marseille in the hour that she had planned to give herself to love, but fell into a dream that would claim its own reality. Sleep deprived, nerve ends frayed, I wavered in a timeless zone on the threshold of unconsciousness. Though freed of the domineering bells, on this night I was summoned from sleep by buzzing Vespas, traffic squealing at the corner, insinuating sirens, and the raucous blather of beer-emboldened students weaving down the sidewalk. Through waking nightmare’s mist, I pictured drun
ken youths brandishing sledgehammers, scaling graveyard walls beneath the stars of Ihringen, bludgeoning the tombstones. Unremembered ancestors were crying out for peace, and then I saw my mother weeping—the frightened girl who had unhappily left Germany, yet found in France the tender man whose memory abided in her heart.

  When morning came, I called my cousins in Mulhouse and asked if I might spend the weekend with them. It was a side trip I had not at all anticipated. But my airplane home was three days off, and like my grandparents in 1938, I decided that if I couldn’t get to America immediately, the time had come to leave for France. Michael kindly volunteered to drive me there, and as we crawled to a stop at the checkpoint at the river—the long-disputed border that once divided the hope of life from almost certain death—I was shocked to see the guards just glance at us perfunctorily and wave us through.

  Indeed, the watch on the Rhine spotted nothing worth investigating in the car that carried me on the path of my family from Poststrasse 6 in Freiburg to relatives in Mulhouse. Nothing unusual in our traveling together, German and Jew whose histories unfolded from the very same address. I myself was only starting to perceive the import of my journey—that the force and nearness of the past were luring me to France on a mission of salvation.

  The lesson I’d learned in Germany was that the past was not a thing forever lost, but rather a place that was waiting to be found. Faces lined by years were waiting to be recognized. Yes, crossing the Rhine, I was following a route that my mother had mapped out and shared with me for decades, as if preparing me to meet the challenge of this moment. Now I would go to find Roland, as my mother had before me.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE AGENDA

  THERE WERE THREE Arcieris listed in the Mulhouse telephone directory—one woman and two men—but to my disappointment, no one named Roland. Had I really let myself imagine that finding him would be so easy? The fact that my cousin Michel Cahen was still living in the same house where decades earlier my parents had visited his parents, Edy and Lisette, tempted me to hope that families in Alsace tended to stay rooted.

  My cousins’ house was located in the same residential section high above the city where I remembered Mother saying the Arcieris lived before the war. So as I drove with Michael Stock through the green and well-kept neighborhood, searching for the Cahens’ address, the fantastic possibility began to blossom in my thinking that I might actually meet Roland that very afternoon. Living on the Rebberg, too, it seemed quite likely that my cousins knew him. Lisette, who had met him with my mother in the war, would certainly have introduced them—neighbors, after all.

  But once among my cousins, I shrank from telling Michel and his wife, Huguette, and his sister Isabelle, just arrived from Paris for the weekend, the reason for my fervent interest in tracking down a Frenchman who was a stranger to me. Except for Isabelle, I didn’t know my Mulhouse cousins very well and worried what they’d make of it. In recent years, moreover, Michel had startled all the family by embracing such strict new piety that within the very hour of our landing on his doorstep, he was rushing off to synagogue for closing Sabbath prayers with Isabelle and me in tow, there to be consigned to the women’s section in the balcony. Thus it seemed unlikely he’d condone my seeking out my mother’s former lover, a Catholic who was probably long married. With my father’s days so numbered, how awful it would be if Michel wrongfully assumed that Mom herself had dispatched me on this quest, coolly looking forward to a future on her own. He was bound in any event to regard it as delusional for me to nourish hopes of bringing back a love long buried in Mom’s past.

  At dinner I aimed to strike a casual tone: I took a gulp and plunged ahead and asked about Roland. Michel was silent for a moment, then said, yes, he thought that Edy had represented Roland Arcieri’s wife in a divorce. I tried to smother my delight—divorce!—and bit my lips to keep from betraying Schadenfreude. But my interest must have been transparent. That divorce was very long ago, Michel said, studying my face as he glanced up from his salad. He didn’t have a clue, he added pointedly, whether either party had remarried.

  “His former wife still lives in Mulhouse, là, j’en suis sûr,” he said. “Her family has a prominent flower business. But I don’t know about Roland.” He paused as if debating how much to reveal, told his son to pass the bread, then added that he knew a woman lawyer, once a protégée of Edy’s, whose maiden name had been Arcieri. Perhaps she was related to the man I hoped to find? (In an intersecting network of small-town relations, it turned out she was the daughter of Roland’s first cousin, André; I would also learn that Mom’s onetime classmate, Yvette, who introduced her to Roland in 1938, much later on became Isabelle’s high school English teacher and a friend of the Cahen family.)

  After dinner—Michel adding to my self-consciousness by settling in an armchair to read the newspaper in easy earshot of the telephone—I called the colleague he suspected might be related to Roland. But when I failed to get an answer, I was left with no alternative on my only night in town but to try all three Arcieris listed in the phone book. I dialed with no clear thought of what I’d say if anyone responded. Intentionally, though, I started with the men, feeling that before I called the woman I would have to brace myself to learn that Roland had ultimately remarried and subsequently died, leaving her his widow. But neither man replied, and when I called the woman, Emilienne Arcieri rewarded me by saying she was Roland’s sister! Stammering for words, I said I hoped to reach him because my mother, known as Janine Günzburger before her marriage, had been Roland’s friend in Lyon in the 1940s. But if I hoped my mother’s name would evoke a more cordial note of recognition, Roland’s sister said she’d never met Janine and did not remember anything about her. Besides, she added brusquely, Roland no longer lived in town. Or in France, for that matter. Just when I thought she would hang up, however, she asked me to hold on for a moment. When she came back to the telephone, she surprised me by insisting that she’d prefer to speak in person, so I should come to see her.

  The following morning I consequently found myself standing frozen with a drumming heart before the entrance of an apartment building where Isabelle deposited me on the avenue Robert Schuman in the lower city. No meeting of my life seemed as magically momentous as the one that I was facing. As I lingered in the empty lobby in the milky light of daytime behind frosted plate-glass windows, I felt fearful of resolving lifelong questions with answers that could lead to permanent unhappiness.

  Slowly, debating my best approach with her, I made my way upstairs, rang the bell, and heard her footsteps echo on a hardwood floor. When the door swung open, I stared with disbelief into a face that imagination had imbued with all the perfect features I had admired since childhood in Mother’s few remaining photographs of Roland. But Emilienne Arcieri was altogether different from her younger brother. In sorry fact, beneath the glare of the hallway’s fluorescent light, she was alarming in her homeliness. The nose and mouth so harmonious on him lay heavy and masculine upon her wrinkled visage. Her thick brown brows drooped above her glasses and slanted toward her fleshy ears, which lent her the expression of a mournful basset hound. The rest was a study in challenging topography. Matching furrows were dug into her sallow cheeks, running southward from the midpeak of her alpine nose, and her jowls spread thick and soft. She stood erect in sturdy shoes with shoulders squared, armed against the autumn chill with a cardigan pulled across a belted shirtdress. Stretching to unexpected lengths below her elbows and her knees, her arms and legs were straight and bony, and she was taller than I had pictured. Her sole adornment was a simple golden crucifix that dangled from a chain about her neck.

  We shook hands at the threshold, and inside Emilienne offered me a chair in a bright though sparsely furnished living room and then excused herself to prepare tea in the kitchen. When she returned, balancing a tray that provided us the buffering distraction of mutual activity, she perched upon a stool across a little table from me, giving the impression she might take flight at any mo
ment. Conversation started cautiously. While I was awkward and ambiguous in defining why I’d come, presumably she also had a purpose—as yet unstated—for inviting me to meet her. Thus we poked around each other with guarded curiosity. I told her I had come to France after a few days’ trip to Germany to see my cousins on the Rebberg, and she told me she had lived near them until she’d moved downtown.

  Her life story was a poignant one, gradually revealed with prompting, but without self-pity. Society, like nature, had been stingy in dispensing gifts to her, and marriage had never been an option. She’d purchased her apartment nearly thirty years before, when the building seemed a marvel in its newness and crisp modernity. She had saved to buy it, working as a secretary in the office of a local potash-mining firm. After retiring in the 1960s, she’d devoted all her energies to serving God and caring for her mother, who refused to leave the home where she had reared her family. Only when her mother died at the age of ninety-nine and Emilienne was nearly seventy could she finally permit herself to move into her “new” downtown apartment—decades old by then, in need of paint and waiting for her, empty. Even as we sat there, it struck me that the cold and boxy space was suggestive of a person who had either trimmed her world to bare essentials or else, almost like a cloistered nun, Emilienne Arcieri had never roamed or tasted life enough to garner any keepsakes of memorable experience. At least, that is, mementos of her own.

  “I don’t get many visitors, but I’m very glad you’re here,” she said. At first I took her sentiment for standard hospitality. “Although I never knew your mother, I have something that belongs to her. I have always wanted to return it, but of course I had no idea of how to find her. This is why I asked you here.”