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

by Leslie Maitland

  Why was Alice getting out of the car? She darted into a small notions shop and, emerging with a package, headed to the Rosengart and tapped on the little half window in back where Janine was sitting, miserably staring off into space. Moist curls framed Janine’s forehead and her cheeks were flushed red, by both the hot sun of early September and the pressure of Bella, slumped against her like a thick sack of flour, sleeping again, and now lightly snoring.

  “Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Hannele,” her mother said. Heartfelt good wishes on your birthday. “I’m sorry it’s not a good birthday for you. Hopefully next year things will be better.” Alice smiled as she passed the packet through the window. Inside was a blue plastic rain hat printed with tiny white flowers and with strings for tying under the chin. It was almost identical to one that Janine had noticed and admired aloud, walking with Alice in Mulhouse the previous week, before everything had horribly changed. Janine was touched and broke into tears that had waited all day for an excuse to erupt, like an afternoon storm after hours of heat lightning. “A birthday gift for a rainy day,” Alice said, patting her shoulder through the car window.

  As darkness fell over the Saône River, they drove soberly up the Grande Rue, the town’s main thoroughfare, past an eighteenth-century apothecary shop where the sculpted heads of four women above the arch of each shuttered window unblinkingly met their arrival with stony suspicion. The street mounted a hill from the banks of the river toward the top of the town, where the church and an unexpectedly beautiful town hall presided—its Flemish tile roof fantastically patterned in large diamond shapes of olive green, black, orange, and yellow.

  That first evening in Gray they checked into the Hôtel de l’Europe, where Marie and Bella would spend the next months, even after the rest of the family moved into a few shabby, unfurnished rooms in what they were told was the town’s oldest building—a ramshackle fifteenth-century structure on a small winding street, the rue de la Malcouverte or “the street of the badly covered.” Lacking the most rudimentary comforts, these accommodations offered no running water, no plumbing, no electricity, and no heat. The family slept on wooden crates; a pail on the terrace served as their “outhouse,” while in order to bathe, they gratefully filed once a week into the common bathroom of Aunt Marie’s hotel. Fleas infested their rooms, and they were soon pocked with nasty bites. For drinking water, there was a pump out back, a source they shared with the prostitutes who lived in the building directly behind them and who, short of business with so many men drafted in expectation of war, lounged in the courtyard.

  Alice dealt with life in Gray without complaint, impressed by the general spirit of brave acceptance she witnessed as Frenchwomen sent their children alone into safety or fled their homes carrying virtually nothing, their valuables sewn into the clothing they wore. For the good of the nation, the government urged “calm and sangfroid,” advising residents to observe the strictest discretion in speech because “the ears of the enemy” were everywhere, listening.

  In the face of these things, Alice felt fortunate to have her family together, and she consoled her two daughters with uplifting tales of the wealth and comfort that would await them after the war, when Sigmar could finally claim the inheritance left by his two older brothers who had died in New York. They had left many millions, with Sigmar, Heinrich, and Marie all named in their wills. “After the war, we’ll be very rich,” Alice promised, “and we’ll live in a beautiful house again and eat lots of good food and wear fine clothes.” For now, however, they would have to rely on what funds Maurice, Aunt Marie’s son-in-law, could send from Lyon as a loan against those expected bequests. “In case I die before then, just don’t bury me in this horrible dump of a town,” Janine griped to her mother.

  Once viewed as a snob by her children, Alice faced every fresh hardship with stoicism and even good cheer. “We must count our blessings!” was the lifelong philosophical lesson that she would take from a second ordeal of living through war. Stories kept filtering over the border about hundreds of German Jews killing themselves to avoid deportation to what were being described as “modern ghettos” in Poland, and the Nazis predicted that within a few months, all of Germany’s Jews would be gone. It was reported that German officials had discussed this bold project with their allies in Moscow and that Kremlin leaders had raised no objection. Jewish men were sent first, put to work in occupied Poland to build living quarters, Alice read in the paper, and their wives and children would be sent on to join them. There was talk of Jews everywhere soon being deported and resettled in camps to the east, but how they would live there was never made clear.

  The same week the Günzburgers arrived in Gray, the French Ministry of Education announced that school would begin as expected on October 2 and that students should attend classes in the towns where they were, rather than return home to their regular schools. With Monsieur Fimbel’s assistance, Janine and Trudi were enrolled in a mostly-boys school, and while more refugees turned up within its gates every day, the new German girls attracted attention.

  “You can’t be Jewish,” a native of Gray named Claudia insisted to Janine once they had gotten to know one another. As a student in Freiburg, Janine had experienced little outright anti-Semitism from her classmates, and she steeled herself as she waited to learn where this conversation was heading. “Why’s that? What do you mean?” Janine asked, uneasily eyeing the students gathered around them under the trees in front of the school. “Everyone knows that Jews all have horns,” Claudia told her, bringing her hands to both sides of her head.

  Some fifty years later, however, it was Janine who could not recognize her former classmate when they encountered each other by chance on the street. We were together on her first trip back to Gray since the war, a bright autumn morning in 1989, when a tall, gray-haired woman, bent over a cane and wearing a long black dress and sensible shoes, stopped us at the top of the town to speak with my mother. She was slightly winded from having climbed up the steep flight of stone steps that led from the Malcouvert to where we were standing outside the town’s Renaissance church.

  “I feel that I know you,” the Frenchwoman said to my mother, as she adjusted her weight on her cane on the uneven ground and set down a net shopping bag of groceries. She peered intently at Janine, at her cropped blond hair and her loafers, her turtleneck sweater and pants and black leather jacket, as if trying to see into the past to find someone with whom she once had something in common.

  “Je m’excuse.” My mother smiled at the woman. I’m sorry, that’s impossible. Her voice was gentle as she answered in French.

  “Mais vraiment, j’en suis sûre,” the stranger replied. I’m certain I know you.

  “No. That’s not possible. I live in America. I’m an American,” my mother insisted. The other woman paused several seconds, looked into her eyes, shook her head and moved on.

  “Eh bien, au revoir.” Until the next time, she called resignedly over her shoulder. There was something wistful in the way she waved without turning around. As if she knew better.

  “I wonder why that old woman thought that she knew me?” my mother mused aloud as we watched her gingerly make her way across the cobblestoned plaza. I turned in surprise. “Isn’t it possible that you did know her when you lived here?” I ventured. “After all, that was a long time ago.”

  Her face went blank as she considered my words, and her memory reached back through the years, deducting the changes that age would have wrought. “Claudia,” the name suddenly fell out of her mouth. “How stupid of me! Of course, you’re right. That was Claudia, my friend, I’m sure of it now.” She spun around to call after the woman, but the plaza was empty, and the tall, stooped, dark figure was gone. Mom’s face was stricken as her eyes searched the square. “Oh, what a shame! Claudia! I wish I’d spoken with her!”

  But I could see what had happened. For my mother, the past existed at such a remove that returning to scenes she had known in her youth seemed impossible to her witho
ut literally turning back time. Perhaps that was why she had failed to go back to search for Roland all those years, I suddenly realized. The past was such a closed book to her now that she did not imagine she could ever find her way back, or that, if she did, there would be anyone left to welcome her there.

  When Janine first arrived in Gray at the age of sixteen, her sense of place in the world had become elastic. In the previous academic year, as a newcomer to France starting school in Mulhouse, not knowing the language, she was ashamed of being demoted. Now when asked where she belonged, she seized the chance to jump herself recklessly a grade ahead. In the humanities she felt confident that she could manage, but in math and science this proved a more daring adventure, especially as she harbored the goal of becoming a doctor. That October, in addition to her regular classes, she embarked on a difficult course of nursing studies aimed at preparing for medical school. Over the span of a year, she filled many books with copious notes, all in French and exquisite handwriting, detailing the causes, symptoms, and cures of innumerable maladies from appendicitis to tuberculosis, along with explanations of the body’s intricate systems and functions. She studied nutrition and hygiene and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as emergency treatments for all sorts of problems: asphyxiation, coma, shock, poison, fractures, heatstroke, even gangrene. Eagerly, she threw herself into these medical classes, but when it came to her regular schoolwork, she was far less engaged.

  The Lycée Augustin Cournot, which Janine and Trudi attended in Gray (photo credit 6.2)

  “She is behind in her work,” her mathematics teacher groused on her report card, and the principal, while praising her ready spirit to learn, suggested that she could do better and called upon her to “redouble” her efforts. So much of her sense of self, of her worth in the family, had always included winning her parents’ approval by succeeding in school that this new situation felt confusing and frightening. She could not disappoint them, but neither could she admit having lied on her registration about the level of education she had completed. And so she was forced to depend on the boys, who were only too happy to help one of the very few girls in their class. During exams, her Gallic gallants would go to the bathroom and leave her their answers, and citing a need of her own for leaving the classroom, she would retrieve them a few minutes later. Where the boys were concerned, she confided to Trudi, for the sake of her studies, she couldn’t afford to discourage their interest.

  Still she thought of Roland with each waking moment, imbuing him with all the perfection that first love, and a love so abruptly stymied by external forces, could ever embody. Each daisy she picked in the fields provided the means for testing love’s strength. “Er liebt mich,” she recited, plucking a petal for each of the options. “Mit Herzen, mit Schmerzen, über alle Maßen, ganz rasend, ein klein wenig, gar nicht!” He loves me, with heart, with pain, beyond all measure, wildly, a little bit, not at all. Based on the number of petals on the flower in hand, she tried engineering the outcome she wanted through the right choice of ditty, as they varied in length according to language. “Il m’aime, un peu, beaucoup, à la folie, pas du tout!” He loves me, a little, a lot, madly, not at all. Least risky, of course, but least lyrical was the binary English, which she had just started learning and reserved for those days when she most needed a boost: “He loves me, he loves me not; loves me, loves me not; loves, not.” Having lost control over her future, it brought some satisfaction to tinker with fate, and Janine felt compelled to do whatever she could to get the right answer.

  In school, she sat at her desk with her mind on Roland, combining her own name with his as she idly doodled on notebook pages, symbolically reuniting with him through a blending of letters to create a single identity out of the two. Roljan, she wrote in elaborate letters. Rolanine. She drew a lopsided heart around that odd appellation, teasing herself with the now-impossible notion of joining with him, and added a border of flowers, specimens unknown to science blooming over the page.

  She got away with these things without attracting her teachers’ attention, but when the school distributed gas masks to all the students, fearing attacks such as those France remembered with horror from two decades back, she ran into trouble. Day after day, as the uneventful drôle de guerre gradually lulled everyone into complacency, she decided to make better use of the cylindrical, gray metal gas mask container that students were expected to carry to and from school on long shoulder straps. The hideous masks made them all look like space aliens with huge glassy eyes and crinkly snouts, and the imminent threat of attack that seemed frightening at first when war was declared by now seemed somewhat silly.

  One day after school, a new friend with unusual skill as an artist, Marie Louise Gieselbrecht, decided to decorate the plain surfaces of their gas mask containers, which were shaped like tall, narrow cans of a size suited to carry a bottle of wine. The Gray postmaster’s daughter, known to all as Malou, covered her own with a modernistic, abstract design, and on Janine’s she painted a whimsical scene of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves frolicking in a colorful circle, the first Disney animated film having delighted the world just two years before. Enchanted with the result, Janine removed the gas mask, hid it at home, and decided to use the container instead as a purse.

  Only days after, as sirens blared through the school for their first air raid drill, the students were told to put on their gas masks and rush to the basement. Unmasked—her container found to be housing only her lipstick, her comb, her key, and some money—Janine was punished with a week of detention. The former nebbish of Freiburg ever after felt proud of her insouciance while facing the perils of wartime. When war with the Germans broke out for real the following spring and four-minute sirens signaled not practice drills, but possible bombing attacks from the skies over France—blue skies that cracked open like robins’ eggs—Janine would flat out refuse to hide underground.

  By then, thanks to a loan from Maurice, the family had moved with Marie and Bella to a grand apartment on the avenue Victor Hugo near town hall. Their second-floor rooms were rented from native Graylois by the name of Fournier, both husband and wife making it clear they cared less about helping Jews displaced by the Nazis than about earning money, as food grew scarcer and the future more doubtful. The Fourniers continued to live in the ground-floor apartment and could be seen, dressed in their finest, their arms clasped behind them, taking circular walks every day after lunch, around and around the same flowerbed in their very own garden. There, directly in back of the building, a wooden trapdoor in the ground opened to steep steps that descended to a dark and dank basement, where the residents—landlords and tenants—were expected to wait out air raid drills that were ever more frequent. It was black down below (no candles permitted) with bare stone walls as cold and as clammy as death and with a sharp smell of mildew infecting the air. Each movement in the tight, confined space, the kiss of fabric on skin, caused someone to jump or cry out for fear of having been grazed by a foraging rat.

  When sirens wailed over Gray for the third time within days, and Sigmar called everyone to head for the shelter, Janine decided that dying above would be preferable to going back down. The instructive drawings she saw in the papers of little stick figures looking like ants in happy survival and comfortable shelter under mountains of rubble failed to inspire her. “If they bomb the house and it crumbles on top of the shelter, we won’t survive, we’ll only be trapped down below,” she maintained, defying her father by refusing to move.

  Alice stamped her feet in frustration, looking to Sigmar to order Janine to the door, but Marie spoke up first. “She’s right,” Sigmar’s sister said simply, sitting back down. And as she would not go, the constant Bella decided not to go either, and then wordlessly Trudi also sat down. “Do something!” Alice uncharacteristically glared at her husband. Sigmar shrugged; his eyebrows appealed to the heavens—either to God’s higher wisdom or to the grace of the pilots who might look down from their bombers and pity a father, thereby agreeing in
mercy to spare them all.

  Earlier, though, as the phony war dragged on through the winter, the greatest threat to survival in Gray came not from bullets or bombs but from the terrible cold. In their large, empty, unheated apartment, the family huddled together for warmth in one little room off the kitchen. But the chamber pots under their beds froze over at nighttime, and their fingers, red and raw, swelled to the point they broke open like knockwursts. Inside or out, they wore coats and hats all the time, even in school, and to guard against slipping and falling down steeply sloped streets, they resorted to wrapping their shoes with coarse rags. Longingly, they remembered the potbellied stove left behind in Sigmar’s old office in Mulhouse, and since there was still no sign of impending German invasion, the temptation arose to retrieve their things. They decided that Sigmar would go, taking Janine along chiefly because her French was more fluent.

  Having already obtained their wartime identity cards as foreigners residing in France, they now had to apply at town hall for safe-conduct passes, setting out their travel plans in detail and their reason for going back to a zone of evacuation so close to the Rhine. The towns of Alsace were largely deserted, and an eerie silence prevailed even in Strasbourg, its largest city, whose three hundred thousand residents had been moved. And yet, almost one hundred days after the declaration of war, fighting had not erupted on French soil, and after strengthening the Maginot Line, the French confidently believed the Germans knew better than to try to attack. As a result, Sigmar felt no particular fear about traveling back toward the border, and even Alice raised no objection.