In This Hospitable Land
Page 46
All together these efforts had kept down the death toll but ultimately could not fend off the Nazis and their collaborators. Of the nearly hundred thousand Jews living in Belgium when the war began, some seventy thousand had been deported and more than twenty-five thousand had been killed outright.
“Some say government officials were complicit,” André fretted. “I don’t see how so many Belgian Jews could have been killed if that wasn’t true.”
Fewer than five thousand Jews continued to live in Belgium. Anna was one.
“But I don’t understand why they came for the girls,” Denise said miserably. “Were they members of the Resistance?”
“No!” Anna keened.
“None of our family participated in Resistance activities…in Belgium,” André said softly.
“There was no reason to take anyone!” Anna howled. “Except that they were Jews!”
Denise knelt beside Anna, took her hands, and asked, “Why didn’t they take you?”
“They did!” Anna shrieked. “I was already on the truck with my poor girls. My babies!”
André explained, “Our queen intervened. She had little power but demanded that women over sixty-five be spared. Anna was saved at the last minute.”
“To outlive my children and all the others! To live out my years in endless tears!”
Denise turned green, released Anna, and begged of her husband, “All the others? What does she mean?”
André took a deep breath, got down onto his knees next to his wife, and took her hands. “Tante Anna says none of our family is left in Brussels or Antwerp. The only survivors besides her are those who like us left before the war.”
“Rose,” Anna muttered, weeping. “When can I see my sister?”
Very quietly André told Denise, “We’ve lost sixty-five members of our extended family, mostly in Auschwitz. When I think that some of them mocked us when they learned of our plans to leave Brussels…”
“Where are the children?” Anna asked hopefully, drying her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I so need to see them.”
“Playing outside,” Denise breathed huskily. “They’ll be back soon I’m sure.”
“They’re all I have left,” Anna said, smiling as best she could.
“What about the university, your colleagues?” Denise finally thought to ask her husband.
André shuddered. “Alexander Pinkus was arrested as a professor and a Jew. He also died in Auschwitz.” André lowered his head. “At least members of Le Cercle du Libre Examen formed the core of the Resistance. I can be proud of that.” When he looked up again he said, “They’ve made me head of the department. Temporarily.”
In a hushed voice, Denise said, “You hoped for that position someday.”
“Not this way.”
The door opened and the children rushed in. Christel and Cristian began playing with their delighted great aunt immediately. Ida drew her parents into the bedroom.
“We heard a rocket pass overhead. We were so scared! But then some American soldiers came by. One gave each of us a lemon. After that everything was okay until some nasty children in the park pointed at us and called us ‘dirty Jews.’”
“It’s all right, all right,” Denise intoned, pulling her daughter close and wrapping her in her arms. Then she looked at her husband imploringly, eyes full of fear.
“We survived,” André told her compassionately, prayerfully. “With all we have survived.”
Epilogue
André Sauverin returned in October of 1944 to resume teaching at the Free University of Brussels, now a full professor and chair of the Chemistry Department in place of his mentor, Alexandre Pinkus, who had remained in Brussels and subsequently perished at Auschwitz. Alex, returning to Brussels at the war’s end in May 1945, resumed pursuit of his business as an expert philatelist. In 1950 the family immigrated to the United States, André as a Fulbright exchange professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in large part because of the Quaker heritage of the city. When Denise died in 1952, André determined to remain permanently in the U.S., resigning his position at the Free University of Brussels—only the second tenured professor at the university to do so since its founding in 1834. He was acclaimed Professeur Honoraire of the University.
He left academia feeling a professor should not teach after age fifty and went into the private sector to develop fuel cell technology for peaceful uses. André, Alex, and Genévieve joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). André died in 1981 leaving three children, their spouses, and seven grandchildren, all Quakers.
Max Maurel’s Remarks for the Dedication of the Granite Bench in Vialas, France
October 2003
Vialas welcomes today the children of the family of André Juliard who have come here from the United States with the desire to show their attachment to this community where they spent four years during World War II. They are offering to the community in a gesture of gratefulness a granite bench which hopefully will decorate our public area.
In 1940, the Juliard family escaped Belgium and arrived here in the south with the flow of the refugees. How and why did they come to here in Vialas? Probably they chose this region of the Cévennes for geographic and historic reasons, then also the minister of Millau where they were living advised them to settle in this area, since they lost all hope to go back to occupied Belgium.
This choice revealed itself to be a good one, and for the last sixty years the children have kept these memories alive and every time these children travel in Europe they try to come back to Vialas to see the region and many of the friends that they knew at the period of their lives.
Having arrived in 1940, the family settled in the farm “La Font” which they rented in Soleyrols. The family was a city family, ignoring the realities of the countryside and the rugged terrain. Yet from the first year on the farm and with the help of their neighbors they were self-sufficient with their harvest of their farming, due to their willpower and courage which attracted the respect and admiration of their neighbors. André said one time after he had worked at hard labor on the farm, “I never knew that my body had so many muscles, and tonight the pains are teaching me this!”
In 1943, when the Milice made several attempts to arrest refugees and those families who were protecting them, the family became dispersed, and André moved to be close to the Maquis while other members of the family were placed into several families who lived in the community of Saint Frezal.
Yet for them the memories of those years remain with them, alive: Vialas, where they left one of their family in the cemetery, where one of their children was born, where their children went to school, where friendships were made, and where the names of the different farms, households, roads, the paths still remain familiar…
In this region of the Cévennes which has saw so many refugees during those dark years, there are very few examples such as this family has done, by coming from so far and from all over the world to share with us, thus the work and the philosophy of the Cévenoles.
I did know well André and Denise, his spouse. Allow me to say that their relationship with those who knew them—allow me to mention some of their names like Brignand, Guibal, Benoit, Velay, Bonijols, Le Pasteur Burnand—it was really a relationship of the spirit acting in a symbiotic manner with the others by their willpower, their energy, and their hope, surmounting any difficulties of daily life, and this same spirit shines in their children.
FIN
Additional Sources and Acknowledgments
Quand le Gard Résistait
1940–1944
Pierre Mazier
Aimé Vielzeuf
LACOUR/COLPORTEUR
Cévennes
terre de refuge 1940–1944
Philippe Joutard
Jacques Ponjol
Patrick Cabanel
Presses Du Languedoc/Club Cevenol
Vichy France
Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944
R
obert O. Paxton
Columbia University Press
Petain
Nicholas Atkin
Longman
About the Author
Photograph by Christo Brock, 2008
Lynmar Brock, Jr., is a native of Pennsylvania who grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Newtown Square. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English and an MBA from Dartmouth College before joining the U.S. Navy in 1956. He served as an officer on a destroyer in the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and later was transferred to the Pentagon, where he worked in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. After returning to civilian life, he took over operations of Brock and Company, his family’s food-services company, where he was president/CEO for forty-five years. He has also served on the board of directors of Rotary International, and his work with this worldwide service organization has taken him to India, Madagascar, Pakistan, and the Afghan border. In addition to In This Hospitable Land, Lynmar Brock is the author of Must Thee Fight and Genevieve. He is currently at work on his fourth book. He and his wife, Claudie, have two sons.