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

by Leslie Maitland

  It was within forty miles of Mulhouse, where I would look for Roland, that my mother’s story began in Freiburg im Breisgau. On a map of Europe, Freiburg is easy to pinpoint. I am tempted to say that it sits just where Germany’s profile, facing west and lustily sniffing with interest, pokes its nose over France and Switzerland’s borders. But that does not do it justice, for its beauty is haunting.

  Freiburg im Breisgau and its Cathedral of Our Dear Lady, nestled beside the Black Forest mountains, 1906 (photo credit 2.1)

  Founded in 1120, the town is tucked into Germany’s southwest corner, an area that until 1918 was known as the Grand Duchy of Baden, in a temperate valley curtained by lush pine slopes of the Black Forest. Unusual, narrow canals line its cobblestone streets, nine miles of “very little rivers” or Bächle that bring an ever-flowing rush of cool, running water from the mountains to swirl like a ribbon throughout town and then empty into the Dreisam River, flowing on toward the Rhine and the border with France. The Bächle are only about one foot wide and have delighted generations of Freiburg’s children, who jump over them, float toy boats in them, and crouch to play with their gurgling waters. These charming canals, an elite, five-hundred-year-old university, and a majestic High Gothic cathedral soaring in filigreed, red stone splendor at the center of town have all contributed to Freiburg’s well-deserved reputation as a jewel of Germany, despite its snug size.

  For most of my life, however, my mother has tried to deny that this was where she was born, her hatred of the Nazis making her loathe to admit her descent from their fatherland. Asked the place of her birth, she is always evasive, relying on the tortuous back-and-forth of Alsace’s control by France and Germany over the centuries to distort which nation claimed her hometown at the moment she entered the world.

  As a child, I awkwardly aped her fudging and mumbling when asked to explain her background to friends. I found it perplexing that my self-proclaimed French mother lapsed into German to speak with her parents, her brother, and her sister. To this, she always maintained that her birthplace was German when her parents were born, before World War I, so that German was their native tongue, but under the treaty ending that war it reverted to France and was French at the time of her birth four years later. Her geopolitical story fooled me far longer than I should acknowledge. The truth of the matter, I eventually learned, was that the high-ceilinged bedroom at Poststrasse 6 where my mother first opened her eyes was in Freiburg (never a part of contested Alsace, although very near it), so that she, like her parents, was German.

  That her rejection of everything German had actually included changing her name was another detail she always glossed over. Even her future husband discovered her original name and birthplace only after they married, when, as they crossed into Canada on their honeymoon, she was obliged to show him her passport. My father’s French bride, Janine of Mulhouse, was thus disclosed at the border to be Hanna of Freiburg. Symbolically, if not otherwise, the French Canadian border was an appropriate place for the truth to come out, as her change of identity had initially occurred at a border, when she first crossed the Rhine escaping the Nazis.

  On that train into France in 1938, she renamed herself Janine, choosing a name close to the one that her parents—Sigmar and Alice Günzburger—had wanted for her but were barred from selecting for political reasons. In the aftermath of crushing defeat in World War I, German authorities deemed their first choice, Jeanette, to be overly French. Officialdom switched her name to Johanna, taking no note of the fact that the name already belonged to Alice’s mother, and that it went strictly against German Jewish tradition to name a child for a living family member. As a result, my mother was simply called Hanna until the day she left Freiburg—or Hannele, with the -le suffix that the local badisch dialect attaches to nouns as a form of endearment.

  Hanna was born on September 5, 1923, the very same year that the town’s Nazi Party marched into being and two months before Hitler’s first thwarted attempt to seize power. It was a time of such horrific inflation, with Germany staggering beneath a punishing burden of war reparations, that the midwife who brought her onto the scene left the house, pockets bulging, with five million marks for the service she rendered. Whatever the rate of exchange, my mother was certainly worth every Pfennig, but in point of fact, the money was worthless. Society reeled as the value of the mark fell from 8.9 to the dollar in 1919 to a meaningless 4.2 trillion to the dollar only four years later.

  While many lost their life savings, in spite of hard times, the reconstruction required after the war helped Sigmar’s steel and building supply business prosper, and the house, with its ample rooms, curving staircase, and balconies overlooking the garden in back, quietly advertised his successes. Its size and location, in the heart of a city renowned as a center of culture and learning, spoke to the strides Jews had made in social acceptance. The house sat beside a lively tourist hotel, the Minerva, just a short walk from the main post office, the railroad station, and the old picturesque hub of town. The Minerva stood at the corner where the Poststrasse and the Rosastrasse met at right angles, and across the street Sigmar and his older brother Heinrich had set up the business that carried their name. The Gebrüder (Brothers) Günzburger had offices and a warehouse there and a larger warehouse alongside the city’s freight railroad tracks.

  Each week Sigmar traveled with his chauffeur in his large black Opel sedan on sales trips through the region that bordered the Rhine. But with his office so close, on most days he returned for a warm and hearty midday meal to a home staffed by a maid, a cook, and a governess, and run with the orderliness that he demanded. The life he expected to offer his children was one of comfort, learning, duty, and discipline in a country where both he and his wife traced their lineage back for hundreds of years.

  To an unlikely extent he succeeded. In spite of the Nazi assault that later made my mother an exile from a world she had thought was secure, never again would she recapture the sense of belonging that she enjoyed in Freiburg, where everyone knew everyone else and their family history through generations. Many years later, walking unrecognized on those city streets after decades of denying her birthplace, she was all the more shaken by an ambush of rage and regret that she could not have lived out the life to which she was born. She was overcome with resentment knowing that she—unlike the citizens sauntering past us or enjoying their Würste and their beers in the afternoon shadow of the glowing cathedral—had been uprooted and forced to run for her life from her birthplace and the country where all her ancestors lay buried.

  Her mother, born Alice Heinsheimer, proudly traced her family back to 1695 in the farming community of Eppingen southeast of Heidelberg, and she treasured the artifacts confirming her background as if every inked tendril on yellowing parchment sprouted from roots dug deep in the nation. Hanna’s father could similarly follow his family tree back to 1645 on either side of the Rhine. Both Ihringen, a few miles from Freiburg, where Sigmar was born in 1880, and Eppingen, where Alice was born in 1892, are quaint picture-book towns of half-timbered Fachwerk houses with dark exposed beams framing intricate patterns on exterior walls of cream-colored stucco. Red geraniums, bright as lipstick, gaily dress their façades in well-tended boxes beneath shuttered windows, all primly veiled in white lacy curtains.

  It was only after seeing these towns that I could fully appreciate my grandfather’s wry sense of humor in the ritual greeting he devised for me in my childhood, by which point—having come to terms with so much in life—his forbidding Germanic demeanor had mellowed. Snapping his heels together with the brisk pomp of a nobleman wearing a waistcoat festooned with medals, he would formally bow and intone his imaginary credentials: “Sigmar, Baron von Ihringen.” He solemnly introduced himself as if lord of the manor from his small farming village. “Leslie, Countess von Eppingen,” I was to reply by way of asserting more noble rank, as I extended my hand for a courtly kiss and returned his bow with a curtsy.

  My grandmother’s birthplace of Eppingen,
far more provincial than Freiburg, was a mostly Protestant town that counted just 151 Jews among 3,622 residents in a census in 1880. Alice’s father, Maier, like his father before him, was both a leader of the Jewish community and, as a member of the county council, active in civic affairs. He took over his family’s thriving construction supply business and cultivated a potato field and an apple orchard just outside of town.

  Too early, all this was left to his widow Johanna to manage when Maier, then just fifty-eight, died of uremia on August 27, 1913. Her youngest child, Siegfried, was only ten at the time, the belated birth of this son a surprise to everyone, eleven years after Alice was born, the last of four daughters. At Maier’s death, Alice had just returned from a French finishing school for Jewish young women, and she grieved the loss of the father she worshipped. By comparison, Johanna, clad in shapeless black dresses with her steely gray hair drawn into a tight little bun, was cold and reserved. Alice herself never quite learned how to deal with open displays of emotion, but the death of her father with his tickling walrus mustache left a hole in her heart and seemed to influence her choice of an older man for her husband when she and Sigmar were matched with each other seven years later.

  The Heinsheimer daughters—(L to R) Alice, Lina, Jennie, and Rosie—with their brother, Siegfried, circa 1906 (photo credit 2.2)

  A tall, pretty, fine-featured young woman, Alice—often called Lisel—had long dark braids that she wore coiled on her head like a woven crown, very fair skin, and a profusion of freckles she viewed all her life as a personal torment. Although Sigmar would later insist that he would miss any single freckle she lacked, beginning in girlhood and ever thereafter, Alice eagerly tried any new remedy that promised to bleach them. Sadly, they kept her from seeing herself as the classic beauty she was, with a straight and delicate nose and angular cheekbones that sloped toward the point of her chin like a heart. She found reason for pride not in her mirror but rather in her family background, and she conceived of herself, first and foremost, as a faithful native daughter of Deutschland.

  World War I started a year after the death of Alice’s father. Her brother Siegfried was too young to be drafted, despite desperate conditions that resulted in boys of only fifteen being forced to face new horrors of weaponry—machine guns, mustard gas, and the hellfire of artillery shells. Alice, however, then twenty-two, served through the war in the Eppingen hospital, and she found satisfaction in aiding the cause of her nation by nursing the burned and the blistered, the blinded, the sick and dismembered, who had somehow survived with the rats in the cold, stinking trenches.

  In rasping voices, soldiers shared their suffering with her, and when the ones still able to fight returned to the front, she scrounged candy or soap or other small luxuries to send to her favorites or those most in need of her cheering. In tiny, cramped writing they replied with thanks and bravado—“Forward into Valhalla!”—on the backs of war photographs they turned into postcards and sent from the field. Courtesy of the army, no stamps were required for her former patients to mail her via Feldpost these battlefront pictures in which they posed brandishing swords or impishly grinning amid smoking rubble, and she received hundreds from soldiers she nursed on her ward. She preserved all their pictures and still others in which she modestly posed with her patients and colleagues. Later, wherever she moved over the next three turbulent decades, she took along also a framed, penciled sketch of herself in her nurse’s cap—with her fine, perfect profile—drawn for her by one of her soldiers, as well as a letter of praise from the war-weary doctor who guided her efforts.

  Alice (behind wheelchair) worked as a nurse caring for wounded German soldiers in the Eppingen hospital throughout World War I.

  Alice’s husband, my grandfather Sigmar, was the youngest of thirteen children born to Simon and Jeanette Günzburger, nine of whom survived to adulthood. According to Sigmar’s notes inside the cover of a Hebrew prayer book now brittle with age, Simon’s grandfather had been a respected eighteenth-century rabbi in Breisach, which sat on the Rhine fifteen miles from Colmar in France. But on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1793, during four days of firebombing by French revolutionary forces from the fortified town of Neuf-Breisach over the river, Reb David fled his synagogue. Escaping the shelling, Sigmar’s notes say, his great-grandfather found refuge in Ihringen, and there he soon married.

  Two generations later, while arranged marriages between suitable Jewish families remained the norm, the union of Simon and Jeanette was a rare love match, according to family legend. A large man with laughing eyes, full cheeks, and a thick curly beard, Simon made his living as a cattle dealer, a common trade for Jews in Germany’s southwestern region. It was lonely work requiring much travel, and Simon roamed the countryside with a goal of getting home each week in time for the Sabbath. It would later be said that his amorous wife—in whose memory Hanna’s parents had sought to name her Jeanette—spent his absences immersed in romantic novels and greeted him passionately on his returns, accounting for their numerous offspring. Perhaps it was the influence of fiction that inspired the exotic, non-Hebrew names Jeanette gave many of her children (among them Heinrich, Karoline, Hermann, Norbert, Marie, and Adolf), raising eyebrows of Jewish neighbors. As for my grandfather, while officially named Samuel, he was invariably known by his Germanic middle name of Sigmar, likely because at the time of his birth in 1880, festering anti-Semitism was swelling again.

  Simon and Jeanette Günzburger with their three youngest sons, Heinrich (L), Sigmar (seated), and Hermann, circa 1882 (photo credit 2.3)

  This was especially the case in agricultural regions such as Ihringen, where Jews worked as middlemen handling trade and became targets for blame when struggling peasants could not pay their debts. A religious heritage derived from Martin Luther further inflamed anti-Jewish attitudes, and the resulting lack of economic opportunity spurred several of Sigmar’s brothers to immigrate to America when he himself was still a child. The fortunes they went on to earn in oil wells, diamonds, and Canadian mines would later prove crucial to Sigmar’s maneuvers escaping the Nazis, while for their parents, money from America made it possible to quit Ihringen for the much larger and finer city of Freiburg.

  After centuries of French and Austrian rule, Freiburg was almost 80 percent Catholic and, being so close to the western border, retained some of the egalitarian imprint of French political thought. Flourishing around an august university, it was a more liberal and cosmopolitan urban center, where the couple hoped to find greater religious tolerance, in addition to better schools for their youngest sons. As for Ihringen, Sigmar had such little regard for the town of his birth that he never again returned there or took his wife and children to see it, though it is a trip of barely ten miles. Today, the green Kaiserstuhl landscape between the two towns boasts vineyards whose grapes produce fine white wines—Sylvaner, Riesling, Traminer—and broad fields at the foot of the Tuniberg slopes, where white asparagus or Spargel grows thick and fleshy under dark blankets that shield it from the light of the sun.

  When Sigmar, then nine, first moved with his parents to Freiburg in 1889, the city’s restored Jewish community was only twenty-six years old, following more than four centuries in which Jews had been banned. In records kept in the archives, I have pondered my great-grandfather’s registry there, including the fact that he and his wife were deemed “Israelites” by religion, which made them unusual. Jews had been permitted to start a synagogue in Freiburg in 1865 and a cemetery soon after. But by 1933, when Hitler took power, there were still only 1,138 Jews in the city, comprising just over 1 percent of the population, largely the same as in the rest of the country.

  In high school in Freiburg, Sigmar excelled. It is a testimony to his hope in the Fatherland, his faith that reason or justice might eventually prevail, that he saved his report card and many other official papers in order someday to reclaim his valid German identity. I examine his schoolboy marks with the same maternal pleasure I have derived from the grades of my children, but i
t feels like spying somehow, this looking into the past to check my grandfather’s progress. From country to country, Sigmar carried these records in what he dubbed his Köfferle, a worn brown leather valise, filled with the incontrovertible documentary proof of exactly who he had been, and it therefore became his most valued possession.

  How thankful I am, in my research, for our family compulsion to preserve every document and memento. Letters and pictures, drawings and poems, programs and matchbooks, old report cards, identity cards, postcards, and wartime transit papers. Graveside speeches, telegrams sent almost one hundred years past, birth announcements, the first heartfelt scribblings of children, lined ledgers of spending, and government records that detail a culture as well as a story of persecution. The will that Sigmar wrote out by hand on the eve of his marriage, and the dog-eared booklet of Hebrew prayers and psalms that the German Army provided for Jewish soldiers marching to battle in World War I. The documents stamped by the Nazis that systematically stripped Sigmar of all he once claimed—his name and his home as well as his nation. We are all casual archivists of family history, as if preserving these fragile treasures could stop time and make the people we love at least as enduring as onionskin paper.

  Prior to the war, Sigmar’s wealthy American brothers provided the means for him to launch his iron, steel, and building supply business, starting in Mülhausen across the Rhine River. A bachelor, he had remained single after his mother’s death in 1907 to care for his father in Freiburg, and so he commuted to work until 1914, when he was called up to four years of infantry service. In postcards he wrote home from the front, Sigmar, then thirty-three, explained that after training in Konstanz with the 114th Infantry Regiment, he had been made a Scheinwerfer, manning battlefield searchlights. Were it not for a niece who scoured local farms to send packages of food to him daily, he would have gone hungry. Then he contracted rheumatic fever. Despite his ordeals, Sigmar stood proudly with his regiment, posing for his own wartime postcards. His demeanor suggests that this short Jewish soldier—with a thick mustache and sometimes a beard, wearing a high-buttoned uniform and a flat cap that covered the fact he had already lost most of his hair—was also a loyal German who would always revere Goethe, Nietzsche, Beethoven, and Wagner.