Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

  The consequences of living in crowded, unhealthy living quarters with a seriously inadequate diet and almost total lack of hygiene quickly manifested themselves. Many prisoners—for that is what they were—soon fell ill. Cases of tuberculosis, dysentery, and enteritis, on top of simple malnutrition and exposure, swept through the camp. Many prisoners died in the arms of family members or, even more wretchedly, alone on their mattresses of straw. Medical facilities within the camp, not surprisingly, were insufficient. Severe cases were occasionally moved to the St. Louis Hospital in Perpignan; an exasperated social worker wrote of the institution, “although it resembles the worst medieval general hospitals, it continues to receive patients.”

  In August 1941, the U.S. State Department forwarded a memorandum on conditions at Rivesaltes—written by a relief worker hired by the American Jewish Congress—to a Monsieur de Chambrun of the Foreign Ministry of the Vichy government. The memo concluded, “No self-respecting zoo-keeper would allow the animals in his care to be housed under the conditions prevailing here.” There is no evidence of any reply from the ministry.

  Rivesaltes, it must be said, was not an extermination camp. No one there died by design of the authorities. There were no roll calls, no guard towers, no snarling police dogs, no overt brutality meted out by the French guards. There was at least one instance, reported by a survivor whose testimony was videotaped by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, of a coordinated sexual assault by French soldiers. This witness told of soldiers entering one of the women’s barracks and going up and down the center aisle, lifting blankets bunk by bunk to decide which women to take back to their quarters. But for the most part, prisoners were not hounded, harassed, or humiliated.

  They were simply left alone in that vast empty space to lean into the constant stiff winds that blew winter and summer, the mistral that stirred up the dust and dirt into little cyclones of torment in the dry season and wrinkled the puddles that covered the endless mud when it rained. They were left alone with no books or newspapers to read, no work to accomplish, no place to walk but on the well-worn path to the latrine, no place to sit but on their bunks in their crowded, uncomfortable barracks, nothing to do but wait or hope or dream increasingly threadbare dreams. Children played with stones and sticks. The days seemed endless . . . and yet they ended far too soon for many prisoners of Rivesaltes.

  In August 1942, the Vichy government ordered that part of the camp at Rivesaltes be reorganized as the Centre National de Rassemblement des Israélites, or the National Center for the Gathering of Jews. Foreign-born Jews in the Unoccupied Zone were rounded up, brought to Rivesaltes, and temporarily housed in blocks F, J, and K. Beginning on August 11 and continuing until October 20, nine convoys of prisoners, including both these newly “gathered” Jews and those who had been residents of Rivesaltes for the prior two-and-a-half years, were all loaded onto boxcars and cattle cars and shipped to the extermination camps of Eastern Europe.

  Barracks within the enclosure of Camp Rivesaltes, circa 1941. Today the flat sandy ground is overrun with scrubby stunted evergreens that push their way into what remains of those structures.

  (Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  During the years 1941 and 1942, about twenty-one thousand internees passed through Camp Rivesaltes. More than two hundred died in the camp, including fifty-one children aged one year or younger. More than twenty-three hundred were shipped to their slaughter.

  In November 1942, the German army invaded the Unoccupied Zone and, finding the camp no longer useful for its murderous purposes, ordered the closing of Rivesaltes on November 25. But nearly two years later, after the liberation of France, Rivesaltes was reopened as Camp 162 to house German and Italian prisoners of war. During the following two years, nearly ten thousand inmates lived there. As proof that the harshness of the camp’s climate respected no national boundaries, more than four hundred POWs died in the camp before it was closed again in 1946.

  But the unhappy history of Camp Rivesaltes was far from complete. Beginning in 1954, France waged an eight-year war against the independence-minded population of Algeria, which had existed as a French colony for more than a hundred years. Within that country, there was a sizable population of Algerians, mostly Muslims, who had fought for the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and in both world wars. In the war for Algerian independence, those soldiers, known as Harkis, once more took the side of the French government, and after Algeria secured its independence in 1962, the Harkis were subject to often brutal reprisals from their newly independent countrymen. Many tens of thousands of Harkis were shot, burned alive, castrated, dragged behind trucks, and tortured in other unspeakable ways. Thousands of Harkis fled to France, thinking that the country for which they had fought would shelter them. Instead, the French government refused to recognize the right of these former soldiers to live peaceably within French society and confined more than twenty thousand Harkis behind the same barbed wire fences in Camp Rivesaltes that had imprisoned the Jews twenty years earlier.

  Even in the twenty-first century, Rivesaltes has served as a prison for “undesirables.” As recently as 2007, the better-preserved barracks were home to immigrants, many of them also Muslim and in the country without proper papers. The camp, constructed as a base for the French army to prepare for the defense of its homeland, has instead largely served as a place of misery and anguish for nearly eighty years.

  ONE OF THE FIRST PIECES of documentary evidence from my grandfather and uncle’s long, sad journey through France that found its way into my hands is a list of Rivesaltes detainees that I discovered among the holdings of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Listed above such names as Szpitzman, Lippmann, Stern, Levy, and Wiesenfelder, Alex and Klaus Goldschmidt were among twenty men who entered the gate of Camp de Rivesaltes on January 14, 1941—the date it officially opened as an accommodation center—and were assigned to Block K, Barracks No. 21. A dossier was filled out for each of them—No. 222 for Alex and No. 223 for Klaus Helmut—listing their names, the city of their birth (misspelled in Alex’s case), their nationality (German), their religion (“Israelite”), their marital status, and their profession (“salesman” and “student,” respectively).

  For six months, they survived the brutal cold, the never-ending mistral winds that Alex declared sapped his strength, the flies and vermin, the suffocating boredom that was only occasionally leavened by letters from his wife and children, and the wretched, inadequate food. Neither of them was particularly robust to begin with, and they both lost considerable weight during their time in Rivesaltes. Alex’s weight dropped from 136 pounds to 104, Helmut’s from 127 pounds to just 94. By the time spring came to the Pyrenees and the chill of their barracks gave way to oppressive heat, Alex feared that they would not live to see another winter. His apprehension was intensified by the brutal evidence of his immediate surroundings. In a letter written to my father in early 1942, Alex declared, “We saw people literally dying of hunger before our eyes.”

  Partly to pass the time and partly to earn a small salary that might aid them in acquiring more and better food, Helmut took a job in the camp infirmary, first as an assistant and later as a medical orderly. In that same letter, Alex reported that “part of Helmut’s job was to transfer the dead—sometimes 2 or 3 a day—and carry the bodies out. These were men who, had they had some degree of nourishment, would not have died.”

  In his own letter to his older brother, written the following spring, Helmut recounted his days and nights in Block F, the Rivesaltes camp hospital. Given the severe deprivations he and his father faced daily during their imprisonment, I’m struck by the ironic, sometimes almost playful tone my uncle struck in his narrative. Since I never knew him, of course, his words are all I have to form an impression of his character. I must say that I find him very appealing.

  First, along with two Spaniards, I was what one could best describe as a “Girl Friday” in the three barra
cks that served as the infirmary. Then I was “promoted” and made responsible for cleanliness. I had to make the beds of the seriously ill patients (Careful! Lice!), distribute medicine (“pill giver”), take patients’ temperatures, etc. Part of my job took place in the operating room: I served as the Infirmius, in cases of death to help carry off the dead, which was almost a daily occurrence. I also became adept at helping with bandaging. In dealing with sick people I learned a lot, but it was truly not easy. There were two main reasons that prompted me to stay in the job: 1) I didn’t want to and couldn’t do without the meager pay, and 2) I saw no other way to stay out of the Jewish Tent where I visited Father every evening while he was ill. There the care and treatment were even worse. Of course, I didn’t get fat in Block F either.

  During those first six months of 1941, as Helmut and Alex struggled to stay alive in Rivesaltes, their dire situation was somewhat ameliorated thanks to the successful attempts of three family members to achieve what they had failed to do: attain freedom in America. The first to make the crossing were Johanna Behrens, the sister of Alex’s wife, Toni, and Johanna’s husband, Max Markreich. Max and Johanna emigrated to the West in 1939, spent months in a displaced persons facility in Trinidad, and finally reached safe haven in the United States in January 1941. Immediately, Max began writing letters on behalf of his relatives and some friends he had made during his time in the West Indies. He wrote to the Mizrachi Organization of America to request that a tallith (a traditional prayer shawl) and a set of prayer books, with texts in both Hebrew and English, be sent to the camp he’d recently left in Port of Spain, Trinidad. And on March 17, he wrote an impassioned letter to a New York Jewish relief organization called the National Refugee Service with regard to Alex and Helmut. “Dear Sirs,” the letter begins,

  Alex Goldschmidt is my brother in law, he emigrated together with his son in May 1939 to Cuba, but they could not be landed, because the emigrants on the S/S “St. Louis” got no permits for debarcation. So they returned again to Europe and my relatives came to France, where they have been placed at once in an internment camp. Since that time they changed their stay at several times, and according to a letter which I received just now from Mrs. Goldschmidt (Berlin) they are now in the camp: Ilot K, Bar. 21, Camp Rivesaltes, Pyr. Orientales.

  They are all in fear of their lifes, because they will not be able to suffer the awful privations a longer while. And therefore it is necessary to send Affidavit to the American Consul in Marseille on behalf of the above named persons in order to give them an opportunity to emigrate to the States. Owing to the fact that I am a newcomer and without the necessary connexions I beg you to take care of the unfortunate people and to help them as soon as possible.

  Hoping to hear from you at your earliest convenience I remain, yours very truly, Max Markreich

  His letter seems to have had an effect. About five weeks later, on April 24, Max wrote to a Mr. Coleman at the National Refugee Service, “I have the pleasure to inform you that I was able to procure an affidavit on behalf of Mr. Alex Goldschmidt and his son Helmut in the Camp Rivesaltes. I hope that this fact will facilitate the endeavours to incite the raising of the passage from France to the United States in favour of both internees. Yours very truly.”

  The other Goldschmidt family members who managed to escape Nazi Germany and emigrate safely to the New World were my parents, Günther and Rosemarie. Thanks to their membership in the Jewish Cultural Association (the details of which I describe in The Inextinguishable Symphony) and thus their ability to earn a small salary, plus the intercession on their behalf of a former student of my mother’s father (a violin teacher, Julian Gumpert), Günther and Rosemarie were able to book passage on a Portuguese ship called the SS Mouzhino, which left Lisbon on Tuesday, June 10, 1941. The ship docked at Ellis Island on June 21, and my parents were met by Lotte Breger, a schoolteacher who had raised money to help pay for their passage, and Max Markreich, who had received a letter from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee informing him of the date and time of the Mouzhino’s arrival. Within a few days, Günther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt visited the Immigration and Naturalization Service to sign their important “First Papers,” documents indicating their intention to become American citizens as early as the law permitted. They also changed their names, becoming in the course of the afternoon George Gunther Goldsmith and Rosemary Goldsmith.

  Thus, with close relatives on American soil and the affidavit process having begun, Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt’s fortunes improved markedly. No longer were they mere “undesirables”; they were now “undesirables” with American “connexions.” The French authorities reacted accordingly, and the wheels of the clumsy machinery that held them captive began slowly to turn in their favor.

  The first indication that something had changed was their transfer to a new block of barracks within the confines of Rivesaltes. In early June, they left Block K and were moved to Barracks No. 43 within Block B, a portion of the camp reserved for those detainees with relatives in foreign lands and very real means to join them. From their new barracks, Alex and Helmut wrote a long letter to Günther and Rosemarie, dated June 19, 1941, two days before the young immigrants caught their first exhilarating glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Alex was, understandably, all business; Helmut could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “Dear Children,” began Alex,

  I hope that you will soon have completed your journey across the big pond and that it will have been, in spite of everything, relaxing and beautiful for you after all the strenuous see-saw days of your emigration. I wish you, with all my heart, a full measure of happiness and may all your hopes and plans be fulfilled.

  I don’t know whether you received our airmail letter which was sent to Lisbon. It was taken to the post office on May 30th. I’ll briefly repeat that, thanks to Uncle Max M.’s enterprise and his efforts on our behalf, Helmut and I now have affidavits. But I’m not quite sure whether that is enough. Yesterday I was notified by HICEM [an international organization dedicated to helping European Jews emigrate to safety] that the Joint Distribution Committee has deposited $1,000 to cover Helmut’s transportation expenses. Please tell Uncle Max as soon as possible; he is also trying to arrange for our travel costs. In case he has obtained ticket money for us, please ask him to keep it for us.

  Last year, in October, when we were sent to Montauban, we lost all our baggage except for my book bag in which I had our documents and my private letters, so we don’t have anything decent to wear, not even underwear or shoes. Even though I assume that before we emigrate—unless it does not happen at all because of some overwhelming event—we shall each receive from the Joint a suit, a pair of shoes, and a set of underwear; what we have now is completely useless. No tramp would consider our suit and shoes worth taking along, and it is urgently necessary, if one wants to get a job or a profession over there, to have some basic things.

  The latter worries me a lot, with my meager knowledge of the language. To become completely dependent on my children would be dreadful. I know it would be a crime, after what we have gone through in the last 22 months, to await the end of the war here if there is any alternative. But since one mustn’t gamble with the fate of one’s family and one’s own, the most intensive efforts must be made to get us over there as quickly as possible. I hope to be my old self again in a few months provided it all doesn’t take too long. I am sure that you two are doing everything in your power to get affidavits for Mother and Eva as quickly as possible, so that I can hope to see you all once more in the not-too-distant future. It is this thought that keeps me going and will continue to keep me going.

  When we sailed off on May 13, 1939, on the “St. Louis” and you waved to us for such a long time from the dock, we could not have had an inkling that our voluntary separation would become such a long and involuntary one. Please give my regards to Uncle Max and Aunt Johanna. With many good wishes and loving regards, Yours, Father.

  P.S. Please send the stamps back for Helmut.
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  At the bottom of the second page of Alex’s letter, Helmut hurriedly scribbled a few lines of his own:

  Dear Rosemarie, dear Günther, I’m sure you can’t imagine how very happy I was when we found out from Mother that everything has now worked out for you after all!! I’ll continue to keep all my fingers crossed! I hope you received our letter sent to the “Mouzhino.” I’ll hasten to finish this so that Father’s letter can go off. More soon . . . And so: Good Luck!!! And then: until we meet again!!! Love, Yours, Helmut.

  Nineteen days after they sent that letter to America, on July 8, 1941, Alex and Helmut left Camp Rivesaltes. They had been spoken for; they had “connexions”; they were, it seemed, finally bound for freedom. Placed on a train heading east, they made their way to a new camp near Aix-en-Provence, a camp reserved for refugees with a promising future. I can only imagine the relief they must have felt at leaving behind that vast bleak badlands at the foot of the Pyrenees.

  TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011. What I don’t have to imagine, however, is the image of those badlands themselves. They are here, all about me, as Elodie Montes guides me around the ruins of Rivesaltes. Like me, Elodie has a personal connection to this unholy place. Her grandfather was one of the many thousands of refugees from Spain who were interned here in 1939. When I learn of this essential bond that we share, I wrap her in a spontaneous and heartfelt embrace; she is no longer merely a museum curator but a kinsman of blood and grief.