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

by Leslie Maitland

  Years later, Janine would recall that while the Rosengart remained parked in front of their building in Gray, they went by train because neither she nor her father knew how to drive it, and besides, gasoline was stringently rationed. Once in Mulhouse, they arranged to ship their belongings to Gray, but by now Sigmar seemed even more keen to lay his hands on his office stove than on his piano, however treasured. And to his overwhelming delight, the stove turned out to provide not just the prospect of warmth, but also a welcome source of tobacco, which—deprived of cigars—he craved so intensely that he sometimes stooped to salvage butts from the ground when no one was watching.

  Inside the small stove, he found piles of cigar and cigarette butts that he had discarded while emptying ashtrays in the spring and summer before their departure. Since then, the French government had raised the price of tobacco, and so, unwilling to risk leaving the butts to be scavenged by movers transporting the stove, he scooped them all out. In the cold weeks that followed his return to Gray, despite stiff, frozen fingers, Sigmar sat and contentedly rescued such shreds of tobacco as the butts still contained in order to roll himself new cigarettes—scrawny and stale, yet better than nothing.

  For Janine, however, the highlight of her brief return to Mulhouse came when she spotted a close friend of Roland’s on the street. She called out to him and ran to catch up in order to learn what news he could share.

  “Is Roland still here or have they left town too?” she breathlessly asked. Her heart stopped as she waited to find out whether he had been called up to the army, an image so terrible that she had not even been able to put it to words as part of her question because hearing it said would have made it too real.

  His friend filled her in on what happened in the months she was gone. “Roland left with his family in early October. I think he said they were going to stay in Villefranche.”

  In spite of her mother’s stern warning that respectable girls should never take the initiative in their dealings with men, Janine was thrilled by the thought of making contact with Roland again. She needed to find his address and Villefranche on a map, and she knew Malou’s father, the postmaster, would be the person best able to locate it for her. But when she got back to Gray and reached Malou’s apartment beneath the domed, windowed rotunda of the town’s incongruously grandiose post office building, she discovered the issue to be far more complicated than she had imagined.

  “Which Villefranche did you have in mind?” Monsieur Gieselbrecht asked when she got up the courage to bring him her question. The name meant the same as Freiburg in German, free city, a center of trade; hence, there were many scattered through France. Like a doctor impressing a patient who is already worried over the state of her health with more information than wanted or needed, the postmaster, checking a book, rattled off at least nine towns with that name in varied directions. It would take more than a year for Janine to discover that Roland’s Villefranche was only down the river from Gray, on the banks of the Saône outside of Lyon. For now, however, she had no idea where to find him and feared she might never see him again.

  Before very long, Norbert was out of reach also. That December, just before Christmas, then only eighteen, he had taken a bus to nearby Vesoul to inquire about joining the French Foreign Legion. A military unit made up of multinational volunteers assigned to operations abroad, the Legion was seeking recruits to fight, in case need arose, in North Africa. Although most other young men in town had already been drafted, as a German refugee, Norbert would not be accepted into the French Army. He had nothing to keep him busy in Gray. He hated the Nazis and was eager to prove it. Besides, his status as a native German in France would be even more difficult if the drôle de guerre turned real and fighting began. Since the declaration of war, the French had already started interning “undesirable strangers.” The announcement on December 21 that male refugees of military age would be welcome to volunteer for the Legion offered what seemed a better solution.

  The Legion was known for not asking questions, for caring little about its volunteers’ backgrounds, not even demanding men’s actual names or their motives for joining its ranks. While some volunteers historically signed up for family or personal reasons, political turmoil had often provided a potent incentive. In Mulhouse, Norbert had heard about mass enlistments of French Alsatians who went into the Legion in 1871 out of despair when the conquering Germans grabbed that disputed part of the country. Its motto—Legio Patria Nostra, The Legion, Our Country—spoke to its role as a homeland for swashbuckling men divorced from their roots, men who were loners or with nothing to lose.

  Norbert disappeared for a day to enlist in nearby Vesoul without telling his parents his plans. He had never been one to speak of the dreams that dwelled in his heart, and with his carefree, convivial nature, he did not seem the type to risk danger for glory, so Sigmar and Alice could not have imagined such a decision. Upon his return from enlisting, he poked fun at his new burst of courage, borrowing a determined and dignified greeting from the old Karl May hero he had loved as a boy: Winnetou, the great Indian warrior.

  “How!” Norbert said, his voice primeval and deep as the forest. His face was fierce, his shoulders thrown back, and he raised his right hand in a classic Indian greeting, but nobody laughed. He winked, and they stared, uncomprehending.

  Many years later, when my libertarian father was cheering at Barry Goldwater rallies and urging whole-hog incursions into Vietnam, along with anything else it might take to crush the Communists there, my mother would vow to break my draft-age brother’s kneecaps herself before she would let him go off to war. In 1940, by contrast, with the enemy’s evil so clear, its potential so great, its threat lurking in shadow just over their doorstep, Sigmar and Alice heard Norbert out and, despite their fear for his safety, could not justify their desire to restrain him.

  Norbert himself seemed at ease with his choice, except for the indignity of having to submit the long shiny hair of which he was proud to the indiscriminate shears of the Legion. It vexed him to picture himself sharply turned out in a new uniform only to have his person topped off so unfashionably. Before he left, the family went to a photographer’s studio for a group portrait, stirred by the stark realization they could not guarantee ever all being together again.

  The parents, as the three siblings always referred to Alice and Sigmar, posed sitting in hardback wooden chairs with Norbert standing behind them, flanked by his sisters. He is dressed in a self-styled uniform consisting of a coat with a wide leather belt that sits smart at his waist and a muffler dashingly wrapped around his neck; somehow, though, he already looks older, as his eyes dart away toward some future action. His sisters are wearing identical navy blue coats, custom-made in Freiburg, with gray Persian lamb trim at the collar and pockets, and Alice is somberly clad all in black, save for a ruffle of white at her throat. Her hands are tightly clasped in her lap, the knuckles pale and protruding, as she stares opaquely into the distance. Janine gazes down at the ground, inscrutable, her thoughts clearly elsewhere, while Trudi alone, her face like her mother’s shaped like a heart, permits the faintest of smiles to flirt with the camera. But Sigmar, as ever, focuses bluntly ahead, his double-breasted coat all buttoned up, his gray hat perched flat on top of his head, and his hands on his thighs. A defiant furrow creases his forehead, and the corners of his mouth slope to a frown beneath the brush of his squared-off mustache.

  It was a scene the photographer was coming to know and shooting more often than the bashfully formal wedding pictures that once had provided the bulk of his business. There was a similar theme to these pictures made on the eve of departure: while pictures of weddings glistened with hope, these new ones showed fear that crouched in dark spaces and sat heavy on shoulders as all of France braced once again for the fighting to start.

  Alice and Sigmar seated, with Trudi (L), Norbert, and Janine, shortly before Norbert left Gray for Morocco with the French Foreign Legion (photo credit 6.3)

  SEVEN

&nbs
p; TRAVELING SHOES

  JANINE WAS OUT BUYING a new pair of shoes when two policemen knocked at the door and arrested her parents. She was just walking up the avenue Victor Hugo in time to see the police car pull away from the building, and when it sped by she had to look twice to take in the fact that the man and woman in the backseat were Sigmar and Alice.

  “Wait! Where are you going?” Janine called out, clutching her purchase as she bolted behind the black Citroën. Except for the car and herself, the street was deserted, and the rising edge of alarm in her voice sounded incongruous to her on this sunlit May morning. She chased the car as far as she could, until winded and panting, she had to give up. Alice twisted around in her seat, and her hand flew to the window in a tentative wave, but distance and speed erased her expression, while Sigmar stubbornly gazed in another direction. Confused, Janine helplessly watched the car disappear. Then, like a courier snaking through enemy lines, the disturbing suspicion slipped into her mind that her father may have ignored her on purpose to keep the police from nabbing her too.

  But where were they taking Alice and Sigmar? Never the sort to fool with the rules, her parents could not have done anything wrong. Their respect for bureaucracies’ even most cantankerous mandates duly reflected their birthplace and training. So she calmed herself with the observable truth that the police were not German but French, and the French as far as she knew had not shown themselves hostile to Jews, at least not in this town where Moïse Lévy governed as mayor. Assessing the scene, Janine realized her father was dressed, as was his habit, in a gray pin-striped suit, white shirt, and tie, which he usually fixed with a small, pearl-topped gold stickpin. In short, he did not appear at quick glance like a man who had left in a hurry or skimped on his careful morning toilette, so she couldn’t imagine what the trouble might be. Some formality, surely, involving their papers, no reason to worry, but she had looked forward to sharing her purchase with them—to modeling her shoes around the apartment and to hearing her father’s good-humored response whenever he saw her wear something new.

  “A-a-h,” Sigmar would say, his voice exploring three distinct tones. “What will all the people say when they see you?” He would examine her feet and then nod his head appreciatively. “Madame Schlumberger!” he’d add with a grin, likening her to the elegant wife of a prominent textile magnate in Mulhouse.

  Climbing the hill coming home from the store, Janine had rehearsed a speech defending her purchase: loafers, the color of pecans, with white insets on top and pairs of white tassels. It was a great luxury to get something new, Alice had cautioned, and with everything so stingily rationed now that the fighting had started (soldiers’ boots require leather!), these shoes would have to last her the year. With those thoughts still in mind, it took a few moments—replaying the scene of her parents’ departure—before the understanding took hold that something conceivably awful had happened. That the person now holding the stylish brown loafers was not the same girl who just minutes before, paying for them, had counted out francs and proudly presented the necessary ration ticket to be snipped out of her booklet. Not the same girl who had sat in the store debating brown versus blue, heels versus flats, and had eagerly studied her very own feet, still ready to dream that so beautifully shod, they would take her away from the war to a magical place. She had imagined herself like a female Mercury with wings on her feet, flying off in these shoes to Roland’s waiting arms, because despite these months of political chaos, the war still seemed less a dangerous threat than an unfair intrusion into their romance. Not yet seventeen, she had been floating above the perils around her, made brave by the fact that her hunger to find Roland inspired the only campaign that mattered to her.

  Later and always, however, pricked by guilt, Janine would remember having been blithely trying on shoes at the very same time that the police were leading her parents away. So it is that the mind seems to stitch the unthinkable moment into the simple everyday fabric of the banal. We remember precisely what we were doing when tragedy struck almost as if we could posit some logic, some cause and effect, or some justice involved. Or at least, when rationale fails, there is time and place, the reliable signposts of chronology and geography, to provide some context for what has occurred. Ah yes, I remember exactly, I was doing that when it happened, that when I heard. Those pecan-brown loafers—who could forget them?

  Early that evening, Alice returned home alone and exhausted. Dark circles shadowed her eyes above her sharp cheekbones, and she had removed the pins that generally held her hair in a ladylike coil, so that now her braids dangled over her shoulders, lending her the look of a girl. The police had taken her and Sigmar straight to the gendarmerie, she said, and held them in separate rooms for frightening hours of interrogation. Over and over, they had probed the same issues, as if they would jolt her or trick her into changing her answers, yet she could not figure out what they wanted to hear.

  “Vous êtes allemande? Deutsche, oui?” You are German? one asked her. The description implicitly carried a tired accusation. “So, you tell us you worked in a German Army hospital in the last war. What brought you to Gray? Why are you here?”

  But Sigmar’s record as a German Army war veteran troubled them more. With Hitler’s troops marching now in their direction—not through, but around the Maginot Line to the north—all foreigners were suspect. The French authorities thought it possible that Sigmar, then not quite sixty years old, had been planted in Gray, a spy for the Germans, a fifth columnist, and they could not take the chance of letting him go. Fear of sabotage raged as the Wehrmacht moved closer.

  “Why did you come here?” the police demanded. “How long are you staying? Who are your contacts? How are you spending your time? If you’re not working here, where are you getting the money to live on? What was your business in Germany? Why did you leave there?”

  Sigmar’s answers seemed irrelevant to them. “Very sorry,” they told him, “higher orders, of course, but we have to detain you.” How long they would hold him remained undetermined. Yes, they understood that he had escaped to France to get away from the Germans, that his only son was serving in North Africa with the French Foreign Legion, but they could not take the risk of allowing a possible enemy spy to remain at large with war erupting. They would hold him that night and move him in the morning to a fortress in Langres, a town about thirty miles northwest of Gray.

  The charge? He was branded an enemy alien, a category in which he was far from alone. Under national law, they told him, they were rounding up all German men and many women between seventeen and sixty-six years of age among refugees in the region in case spies or sympathizers were hiding among them. The police captain confided to Sigmar that the group actually included another Günzburger, a man who also maintained that he had sought refuge in Gray after fleeing the Nazis in his hometown of Freiburg. Beneath the friendly façade of sharing a tidbit of information, the policeman’s tone was insinuating.

  “You already know one another?” the officer said. “Interesting … And both of you Günzburgers just happened to move into Gray by coincidence only?”

  In any event, urgent times required extra precautions. The officer shrugged. An exception in the regulations permitted him to let Alice go because Trudi was under sixteen; by virtue of youth, both girls were technically exempt from suspicion, while Marie and Bella enjoyed the protection of French citizenship. The officer in charge told Sigmar that during his absence—hopefully brief, as France would certainly gain victory soon—his female relations were welcome to stay on in Gray, and there was no reason to fear that they would be harmed. But had Sigmar heard, by the way, that spies for the Germans were so godless and crafty that some were thought to be hiding as nuns in the midst of the pious French population?

  The German invasion of France that sparked Sigmar’s arrest began with Hitler’s assault on May 10, 1940, on the three neutral states of Luxembourg, Belgium, and The Netherlands, as Nazi troops slammed over the 175-mile front extending from the North S
ea to the quickly irrelevant Maginot Line with a muscular phalanx of motorized infantry and fire-spitting, fast-moving tanks as had never been seen in warfare before. Hitler’s carefully plotted three-pronged attack aimed to divide his enemies’ forces. To the south, one German division played to French expectations by moving against the Maginot Line. To the north, the Germans drove into The Netherlands and Belgium, luring the strongest Allied divisions to mount a defense. And between those assaults, the Germans launched the most crucial incursion. Later dubbed the Sichelschnitt, or cut of the sickle, it sliced through the dense Ardennes forest of Luxembourg and south Belgium and from there into France near Sedan, above the northernmost point of the Maginot Line.

  GERMAN INVASION OF FRANCE,

  MAY-JUNE 1940

  For all of the money and effort that had gone into constructing an impregnable barrier against Nazi attack, the Maginot Line simply did not extend far enough, leaving France’s 250-mile border with Belgium unfortified. Yet it had penned the French leaders into passive and outmoded thinking. Theirs was no match for the Germans’ fiercely aggressive approach to the war, any more than the creaky French air force could rival Göring’s fearsome Luftwaffe. Stunned by an onslaught from which they had felt secure and protected and disheartened by the prospect of battle, French leaders succumbed to defeat right away.

  “We are beaten!” French premier Paul Reynaud despaired, wakening Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill with a frantic telephone call on just the fifth morning into the war to sound the alarm that the fall of France was already at hand. Undeterred by the military might the Allies assembled—the bombers and fighters, tanks and heavy artillery, as well as ground force divisions amassed by the French, British, Belgians, and Dutch in a belatedly united campaign—the Germans had proved themselves more agile and mobile. They were practiced at smashing by land or diving by air over the borders of Europe, a wake of flames and of death trailing behind them. Once the Germans invaded around the stunted French fortification, any retreat meant inviting Hitler to penetrate farther. Among the French, there was little stomach for the scale of losses they had endured by the end of 1918, when they counted 1.3 million dead—one out of every five men between twenty and forty-five—as well as one million crippled among the eight million men called up to fight.