Someday You Will Understand

by Nina Wolff Feld

  When the firing stopped and it was clear that the planes had gone, my father found himself dangling in a crater. His neat clothes were covered in dirt that had rained down, entering every exposed orifice. The bomb hadn’t exploded. With the blood drained from his face, shaken and dazed, and his ears ringing with sudden but temporary deafness, he thanked the God that he no longer believed in for sparing his life and staggered to safety. The bombing kept their secret safe and bought more time. The Nazi with a crush on Ellen lay dead a short distance away. Dad could remember the garden and the berries, but whatever else—the blood and dirt, smoke, the acrid smells of burning machinery and burnt flesh, the fear, his family’s terrified screams, the yelling of the Nazis—was repressed long ago. My father was unharmed—the irony of war.

  During the interview, he rubbed his chest through his gray-and-white-striped shirt. I vehemently disliked it, perhaps because I found it curiously reminiscent of a concentration camp uniform.

  “I had several victims.” His laughter broke through his wry smile, the mischievous one that showed there was a hidden side to him. He liked to recount the German’s drinking escapades in the cellar of the château throughout the six weeks that they stayed there. Dad points to a photograph: the window on the upper floor of the tower is where my family slept. The fifteen-year-old Walter Wolff is revealed as he begins his story again. The Germans were drinking like crazy; they spent their evenings in the wine cellar. He noticed that the French people had bottles of oil stored on one side in wine bottles labeled “huile,” and the wine was in bottles on the other side. He said the Krauts in their drunken stupor never bothered with a traditional uncorking. They broke the neck off each bottle and guzzled. He switched the bottles; he thought it was a funny thing to do.

  Down to the cellar during the bombings: a family of Jews with a bunch of drunken Nazis leaning on each other, their laughter hiding fear, their odor of sweat and alcohol permeating the darkness, through walls of bottles. Those soldiers were ready and stoked to fight their war, their advance momentarily halted by Hitler himself. My family watched with loathing in their eyes as the soldiers sat drunk in the darkness, singing songs and leaning into each other the way drunk men do. And my father had the audacity to play tricks. Did they sit opposite each other? Was plaster falling from the ceiling with each thud of explosives? How did my father keep from laughing? Had the thunderous sounds of war become so routine that evenings in the cellar were as mundane as an evening spent around the hearth? These questions all have very clear answers. The answers simply cannot be discovered because the participants in this story are all gone. What remains is washed of detail. The château has been restored. The walls plastered over, faded paint given a fresh coat, flowers replanted to blossom in their perennial beauty.

  Later, as a soldier himself, my father wrote hundreds of letters to my grandmother Omi. Most begin “Chère Mamo.” They are written on scraps of dossier paper, army stationery, his bar mitzvah stationary with “WW” in the upper left-hand corner, even Nazi stationary. He experienced war and its beastly rage on the soul but possessed a very special approach and sensibility toward life. Besides a marvelous sense of humor, he had magic, perhaps something he himself wasn’t even aware of. It was an innate ability to compartmentalize, to quickly adapt to any situation or circumstance and function in the realm of that given moment. That aspect of his personality worked to his advantage. Throughout his life he had a singular capacity to draw out the best that life had to offer during the course of a devastating experience. Perhaps this is why this story is so unique. So many millions suffered, but somehow my father’s coping mechanisms made him enjoy what he could and come away with some very charming and, strange to say, fond memories.

  The family left the Château de Noyelles after armistice was declared in June 1940. Decades later, my parents returned during a last trip to Europe together as their marriage dissolved. It should have been something that brought a family together. Instead it was as if my father needed to go back to Noyelles one last time. Before moving on to a different stage, he shared this deeply private moment with my mother. I too wanted to walk the grounds with him to see the strawberry patch, go down to the cellar, and see the room. Didn’t he think it mattered to his children?

  My mother and father went up and visited the room he had occupied half a century earlier. The view out the window—what memories did he see before him? The room absorbed the summer light, making everything bright. Everything had stayed the same. They stopped at the garden. My father pointed to the spot where a boy’s life had once been spared when he was left quietly stunned in the crater of an unexploded bomb. When they were leaving the grounds, the caretaker’s wife ran after my mother, presenting her with a deeply felt gesture: a bouquet of flowers. If I had been there, I would have looked for clues in his face, deep in his tender eyes, that offered an opening into his reserved, quiet exterior. My own family will go someday and stay in that very room. I wish for a marker, carved initials into a hidden floorboard, something to reveal their presence during those chaotic weeks. We were always looking for a way into that reserve, a way to bring him out. No one ever really knew what it was. I can only guess that it took a lot of energy to hide the vast quantity of emotion and fear that he felt. In order to be successful, he pushed ahead with all of his emotional might.

  CHAPTER 3

  Vichy, Lyon, and the Flag of Rags

  France capitulated to Germany, and they left Noyelles-sur-Mer before their true identities could be discovered. Before they continued on, they did several things: Mr. Kresser had the idea that they should make the vehicle look as official as possible. One of them found a brush and some white paint and carefully painted “USA” all over the car, the roof included. Omi made an American flag out of rags, and they attached it to the car’s aerial. They needed gasoline, and my father, Ellen, and Mr. Kresser found a way to siphon gas from the abandoned cars, trucks, and tanks that littered the road. They took rubber tubes and sucked on them, transferring the gas to the bottles they collected, and filled their tank. My father mimes the action during his interview; an incredulous smile breaks through as he recalls what an unpleasant task it was. They went to abandoned cars, ignoring the carnage and the wreckage. Just the fumes from the gasoline must have made them ill, but they filled their tank and headed toward Vichy.

  At Moulins, the border to the zone under French control, the zone libre, Mr. Kresser pulled out his American passport and screamed out the window at the German guard, “Embassy, embassy!” Bewildered, the guard looked at the oncoming car with its makeshift flag and paint job, and said, “I can’t let you through, but I’ll let you go to my colleague down the road. He’s my superior. If he lets you through, it’s fine with me.”

  As they pulled up to the second guard a little farther down the road, he screamed once again, “Embassy, embassy!” and pointed to his passport. This time the guard looked at the passport, saluted, and let them through the demarcation line to so-called unoccupied France. This was nothing short of miraculous, because if their ethnicity had been discovered, they would have been shot on the spot, no questions asked. Besides that, border closings were at the Nazis’ whim and might last days or weeks. From one day to the next, no one knew if they would be allowed to cross. At times there were hundreds to thousands of cars and people lining the road, waiting to cross, with no place to sleep and little food to be had.

  Having crossed many borders in my life, I know it to be an unnerving process. There is always a fear of being searched and questioned, even if one has nothing to hide. As a young teenager, I was once pulled aside and searched at an airport in Italy. I have never forgotten how scared and unnerved I felt. As children, we were never to fool around while crossing a border. On at least one occasion, this proved impossible. We were crossing into Lugano, and my father decided that the guards would take less notice if he played being an “Americano.” He rolled down his window and smiled at the guard while handing him our passports. He looked at the m
an, and deadpan, in the most American accent I ever heard come out of that man’s mouth, he practically yelled, “Luggaanno!” Whereupon my brother, mother, and I fell to pieces in the car, trying not to laugh as he slapped his car seat to shut us up. This, of course, made us laugh more. We had tears rolling down our cheeks as we tried to contain ourselves. Never did we laugh harder.

  After the Germans let them through, a wave of relief must have passed over them long enough to look back and laugh at the gullibility of the young Nazis in charge. My family was now in the unoccupied zone in the center of France, less than sixty kilometers from Vichy. Jews were being rounded up no matter where they were found, though, and it was dangerous. When they finally approached the outskirts of Vichy, with the car decorated as it was, they were greeted by a line of applauding bystanders who mistook them for American dignitaries. Years later, as he would watch the parades and floats slowly move down Fifth Avenue in a sea of color and sound, perhaps my father allowed himself the luxury of a memory of a thousand days before. A young man and his family were the center of attention, with their painted car a beacon of hope for the occupied masses. For just a moment, they could believe that help was on the way, that the Americans had finally stepped in. My great uncle lived in Vichy. They found the keys he left for them before he fled. They stayed as long as they could, decamping six weeks later when it became too dangerous for their cover to be secure. It was Vichy after all, the epicenter of French collaboration with the Nazis. The Gestapo was everywhere, so they left.

  They packed up and headed to Lyon, a two-hundred-kilometer drive that would have taken at least three tanks of fuel. They must have sucked on a lot of rubber tubing to fill their tank when there was none available for purchase. What did they see on the way? How long did it take for them to get to Lyon, on those narrow roads, at the end of the summer of 1940?

  My father on the run in Lyon, France, age sixteen.

  No longer able to use the German “laissez-passer,” they reclaimed their original identities and dropped their American ones. My grandfather must have started to contact relatives in New York to get sponsorship for visas. My father recalled that they were never completely aware of what was happening to European Jewry at the time. They had seen people being arrested. He had a short-wave radio that he always called his TSF (télégraphie sans fil, a French term for a radio), and he would listen to it every night, hiding the sound of its crackling static under his blankets. After he separated the propaganda from the truth, he would update family and friends with news. Even as a teenager on the run, Dad kept a portable radio that was powerful enough to get the BBC, the only truly trustworthy source. Informed, they had a pretty good idea of how the war was going, where and what battles took place. The local newspapers were of no use. Garbage, he said.

  To replenish their shrinking resources, my grandfather sold the escape car. Life on the run required capital, probably access to even more funds than usual. Everything had its price. In Lyon, life was anything but normal for them. There was no school, no work. Food was rationed, scarce, and extremely costly. There were curfews. There was anxiety. The children’s principal occupation was to find food for the family, but Mr. Kresser saw to it that my father had something else to do with his free time. The head of the Resistance was a friend of his, so he introduced my father to him and put him to work at night. At just sixteen, he became a runner for the Resistance. I am sure that my dad felt duty bound.

  His footsteps, made louder by his worn leather soles, clattered on the stone streets. Rainy nights only amplified the sound. They walked and talked casually, just like old friends winding through the nighttime streets, darting into the traboules—covered walkways that were hidden behind unmarked doors. Once used by silk merchants, they now led to safe houses in the old city. It’s all a blur really, the innocuous chatter, shadows clinging to walls. The British airmen nodded as my father babbled at them in French, telling them irrelevant stories while leading them to safety after they had parachuted down from the skies over Lyon. When need be, the sound of his breath was barely audible now. My father had learned to control his breathing. One wrong move could attract attention. If caught, he would have been tortured to betray his loyalties and his comrades and then shot. Lyon was a stronghold for the French Resistance and, as such, was fertile ground for rounding up anyone who went against the regime in deed or in thought. The authorities would have shown absolutely no mercy.

  I think of Omi sitting with her hands clasped, waiting at in their hotel room on Rue Gasparino, utterly terrified that my father would never return, acid in her stomach a reminder of their never-ending fear of being caught. Mr. Kresser sat with her, reassuring her that she would see her son again. Decades later, we would often hear Omi say, “I am my own master,” repeating it as if a mantra with that very distinguished accent of hers. As age pulled her farther away from the life she once knew and the heart-throbbing fear that was her past, she would remind those around her that her dignity was very much intact and never to be taken for granted. Their lives had been so diminished, fighting every day to stay alive, even willing to make the sacrifice of allowing my young father to do his part for the Resistance. The warmth of summer faded, and they spent the fall and winter of 1940 in Lyon. I can never picture my grandfather beyond the photos that I have seen. No one ever really spoke about him. Mr. Kresser, though faceless, looms larger than life.

  They needed to get out of Europe. They had already been warned to leave while there was still time. On her way to Amsterdam, Aunt Hedwig had taken a detour with her young daughter, Doris, and visited them in Brussels. On more than one occasion, Hedwig pleaded with her brother, but for whatever reason they were not ready. My grandparents knew the regime in Germany was trouble; laws against the Jews had forced them to move out of Koblenz long before they settled in Brussels. They simply thought Hitler was a passing phenomenon, that he couldn’t last, and in neutral Belgium they were safely out of reach. How much more of a hint does one need, though, when they still mourned the loss of a family member murdered on the way to a concentration camp shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor?

  In February 1940, Omi received word that her father had died sometime during the weeks before. My aunt Mete, a nurse, had stayed behind to care for him in Mannheim, Germany. It almost cost the former national tennis champion her life. Shortly after her father’s death, Mete was deported to Gurs, the notorious internment camp in southwestern France, where the conditions were deplorable. As with many stories handed down within families, there may be inaccurate nuances here and there, but Aunt Mete was on some kind of line and a guard recognized her.

  Unbelievably, he was Mete’s mixed doubles partner from their tennis days. In order to save her life, he beat her as a cover for his plan to help her escape. Once free, she made her way to Paris where she tried unsuccessfully to locate some family members. Strangers told her that if she stood on the Champs-Élysées, she might be filmed for a newsreel and then spotted by a relative. According to the story I was told, that is exactly what happened! While at the movies in Brooklyn, her sister, Erna, and daughter, Lore, spotted Mete and had the projectionist replay the film until they could stop it and be sure. They were able to secure a visa for her, and she spent the remainder of her life in New York. Amazingly, we lost just one relative to the Nazis.

  My aunt, Meta Bach, playing in the Reich Championship.

  While she was interned at Gurs, Mete’s house in Landau was seized and sold. My father returned to Landau as a soldier in July 1945. The road into town was a sea of red, white, and blue flags. Having not been there for quite some time, my father asked a soldier and three civilians for directions to the house. They found that only the windows had suffered damage. The house was one of the few left intact amid the devastation. They pulled up to the front gate in their jeep and rang the bell. As soon as it sounded, all the lights in the house were turned off, so my father screamed: “Ich gebe Ihnen genau zwei Minuten zum Aufmachen, dann schiesse ich die Tür nieder
!” Translation: “I will give you exactly two minutes, and then I will shoot the door down!”

  Thirty seconds later, a trembling man opened the door and asked him what he wanted. Losing patience, my father told him that he was the nephew of the legal owner and to let him through immediately. These people were in such shock when my father explained who he was that they were left standing with their mouths open. He was told by the “new owner,” an elderly woman called Frau Kopf, that Aunt Mete had ceded the house and that she was the legal owner. She showed my father the contract she had signed at the Polizei Praesidium between her and the Nazis, which mentioned the laws of expropriation. She paid 65,000 marks for it. He requisitioned the house and, before turning it over to the French government, he had the two families, Kopf and Maatz, taken away. From the remaining occupants, he demanded two beds with fresh linen and kept them up until midnight lecturing them on the morality of buying stolen goods while he calmly played with his revolver. They did indeed remember my aunt Mete, especially the elderly Madame Hertel. Dad found the whole incident so amusing that he pressed them further and demanded six eggs for 9:00 a.m. the next morning. He “requisitioned” approximately forty bottles of wine before heading off to find the governing military body the next day, after a very satisfying breakfast. Later that day, after meeting with the governor, he wrote him a formal letter describing in detail the background of the situation and that since the property was in fact expropriated under the laws of the Third Reich, that the house should be surrendered to him as per his aunt’s wishes.