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

by Leslie Maitland

  Sigmar was hardly alone, however, in his distress. The prefecture of Vesoul estimated that 18,500 residents of the Haute-Saône who had joined the desperate flight south had yet to return to their homes in the region. La Presse Grayloise spoke to the awful doubts plaguing countless others not only in Gray but in towns and cities all over the country: “Many Graylois have come home this week; each day we see the return of friends for whom we were worried; in friendship we embrace one another with tears in our eyes. But there are still so many missing. Where have they gone?… The current impossibility of any communication by mail only makes our painful uncertainty all the harder to bear.”

  At the end of the month, Sigmar’s women were transported back to Gray in a hearse. Considering the fact that they had traveled to Vichy by ambulance, their mode of return might have seemed tragic, but the choice had more to do with the state of the times than of their health. Their driver was a former acquaintance of Marie’s, who borrowed the hearse from a friend in the funeral business because he had no other means to ferry them all. It was an open hearse that attached to a car, and while Marie and Alice sat inside with the driver, Janine, Trudi, and Bella perched in the trough reserved for the coffin. In case of rain, they were armed with an umbrella.

  In spite of its heavy occupation by Germans, Alice had insisted on returning to Gray in hopes of reconnecting with Sigmar. She was sick with worry, not knowing what might have happened to him, locked in prison when France was defeated. In Vichy, after leaving the hat shop, Alice and the others had moved into a rented room where each night, out of the depths of sleep, her unconscious wails gave voice to the tension she stifled all day. Her fear for her husband and uncertainty over how best to protect her daughters played out in nightmares, as she tossed and thrashed under the covers of the bed that they shared. By the end of a week, she announced her intention to leave, asserting that she would feel safer in occupied Gray with Sigmar—God willing they’d find him!—than here in unoccupied Vichy without him.

  It was a long and uncomfortable ride during which they crossed paths with what looked like the entire German Army, pressing ahead in triumphant good cheer from the opposing direction. From the backs of their trucks, young Wehrmacht soldiers waved their caps in the air as they passed and even dared smile and shout greetings to Janine and Trudi. But leery of attracting attention that could result in their being stopped and forced to show identification papers revealing them to be stateless and Jewish, Alice ordered them to keep their heads down, avoid all eye contact, and pretend to be sleeping. After riding for hours on bumpy backcountry roads, Janine awoke from a nap to find that a call of nature that had begun as a whisper outside of Vichy had now, inconveniently, turned into a roar.

  “Just squat inside the open umbrella,” Trudi advised her. But with an unending convoy of German trucks passing, Janine rejected her sister’s idea and knocked on the driver’s rear window to ask him to pull off the road for a moment. Then she ran by herself into the woods, hurriedly pulled off her panties, and dropped to the ground.

  “Halt! Was machen Sie hier?” a loud voice demanded behind her. She whipped around to see four German soldiers aiming their weapons straight at her back, and she froze in terror, heart thumping, like a rabbit caught nibbling garden petunias. One of the soldiers pointed his gun barrel toward the panties that Janine still clutched in her hand, and they all burst out laughing.

  “Allez!” the soldier in charge ordered in French as she cowered before him, trembling, uncertain whether they intended to grab her or shoot her if she attempted to run. Still aiming his weapon, he jerked his head past the woods toward the roadside where the hearse was parked waiting, and the soldiers’ laughter continued to ring in her ears, not only until they reached Gray but for decades that followed.

  The first person they met when they finally drove into town turned out to be the wife of the fellow German prisoner with whom Sigmar fled Langres. The hearse was mounting the rue du Marché when they saw the woman from Freiburg, by now a more familiar acquaintance, emerge from a shop.

  “They’re back, your father is back!” she called out to the girls, who sat numbly surveying the rubble around them. At the car window, she told Alice their husbands had made their way home a few days before, and she advised looking for Sigmar in the shelter set up at the school on the avenue Victor Hugo, luckily spared the worst of the bombing.

  “Who knows?” The other Frau Günzburger shrugged, shaking her head, when Alice expressed alarm as to why Sigmar had chosen a shelter instead of going back to their own apartment on the very same street. “Maybe he couldn’t get in. Perhaps he just couldn’t face the idea of being alone there without you.” Then, too, she added, gesturing to the crush of shoppers lining the pavement behind her, he probably didn’t have money or food. “It’s schrecklich, there’s nothing to eat here but Dreck,” she grumbled in German, heedless of who overheard her. “The Nazi dogs are keeping it all for themselves. We’re practically starving, but Gott sei Dank, we’re still alive and together.”

  “Yes, yes,” Alice politely agreed, impatient to drive on, to rush to the shelter. “We must all count our blessings.”

  When they reached the top of the hill, and the driver pulled up in front of their building, Alice handed the keys to Marie and told them all to go in without her: she would go search for Sigmar. It was characteristic of her relationship with her husband that she kept all intimate moments and all expressions of feeling between them totally private. Indeed, though she saved many boxes of letters and postcards from friends and admirers, leaving them for me to discover, when she reached her nineties she contrarily destroyed all the love letters and notes that Sigmar had sent her during their short engagement and very long marriage. “Those letters are personal,” my grandmother said, unapologetic, and she could not be dissuaded from feeding them to the random gluttony of her building’s incinerator. Like doves shot out of the sky, they fell fluttering down the cold metal chute in the hallway, straight to the fiery maw in the basement.

  What happened when Alice ventured into the Ecole Supérieure de Jeunes Filles to seek out her husband among the displaced and new homeless of Gray is therefore a secret. Neither Alice nor Sigmar ever discussed it, but the girls and Marie leaned out the window to peer into the street and saw the couple pass through the gates of the schoolyard and slowly walk toward them.

  Sigmar’s suit jacket was folded over his left arm, his shirt and trousers were grimy and wrinkled, his shoes were stiff with mud from the river, his hat was battered, and he needed a shave. All the same, his right arm was bent at the elbow, and Alice’s forearm rested on his, as if they were strolling down the Kaiserstrasse on a Sunday in Freiburg. Except now this street too, like the rue du Sauvage in Mulhouse and countless others in Europe, was called the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse; they themselves were in occupied France, along with the Germans; and before very long they would have to make plans for fleeing again. At the moment, however, they both seemed content just to walk side by side, not even talking, until they reached the door of their building, where Sigmar glanced up to the second-floor window at his daughters and sister—their faces like angels above him—watching and smiling.

  “Sigmar, Baron von Ihringen,” he announced himself to his female audience with click of his heels, a sweep of his hat, and the hint of a bow. Then he indulged in a grin and the wave of a hero home from the war, and he opened the door for his giggling wife and entered the building, as Janine and Trudi flew downstairs to greet him.

  NINE

  A TELLING TIME

  “GIVE ME YOUR WATCH, and I’ll tell you the time.” That was the joke on the street that wryly summed up for the occupied French how the victorious Germans viewed coexistence. But the time the French got from the Germans was not even theirs. The Germans advanced French clocks by an hour to match the time in Berlin, their bells all tolling together the time of the Führer. It was the Nazi-Zeit on an hourly basis.

  For Senator-Mayor Moïse Lévy, who had held one city
office after another for almost a half century, time was quite simply up. On July 20, 1940, the day that Gray marked the completion of temporary repairs to the mutilated bell tower of the church by crowning its flattened roof with a bouquet of fresh flowers, the German military authority removed him as mayor and named Joseph Fimbel as his successor.

  The Jewish official was out of town when the announcement was made. As senator of the Haute-Saône, he had left in early July to participate in the National Assembly meeting in Vichy that would grant full authority to Marshal Pétain. The elderly general had chosen Vichy—far from the borders and blessed with hotel rooms—as the seat of his government in exile from Paris. Before long, his collaborationist regime would become synonymous with the name of the spa, and the Unoccupied Zone would be dubbed the Zone Nono, once the French understood that “Free Zone” was just a misnomer for an illusion.

  Convening that summer, however, the legislators still hoped to preserve what they could of French self-rule. They arrived in Vichy in a furious temper, not only shamed by the debacle of total defeat by the Germans in battle, but also enraged by what they condemned as new treachery at the hands of the British, their own former allies. In the first week of July, alarmed by the French armistice with Hitler and fearful that, as a result, the Germans would seize control of French warships, Churchill decided he had no choice but to destroy the French fleet—a defensive move he would later acknowledge was “unnatural and painful.” With Operation Catapult, the British attacked French ships anchored off the coast of Algeria at Mers-el-Kébir and at other ports, killing more than one thousand two hundred French sailors and wounding hundreds of others. The fact that the British wreaked so much destruction helped to drive the horrified French farther into the arms of the Germans.

  “France has never had and never will have a more inveterate enemy than Great Britain,” Pierre Laval, Pétain’s deputy, told the senators meeting at Vichy on July 4. “We have been nothing but toys in the hand of England, which has exploited us to ensure her own safety.” The only way to restore France to its entitled position, he urged, was “to ally ourselves resolutely with Germany and to confront England together.” The following day, stung by betrayal, France broke off diplomatic relations with Britain.

  On July 10, gathering in the all-too-appropriate venue of the spa’s Grand Casino, the Assembly gambled away French citizens’ freedoms. The great-grandson of the Marquis de Lafayette stood among 80 parliamentarians opposing the motion, but 569 others fell into line with Laval and Pétain and voted to change the constitution. Now France turned on itself, blaming its downfall on disease from within. Its weakness resulted from moral pollution encouraged by the suspect, secular, and foreign influences of the Jews, the Freemasons, and the Bolsheviks; this was exemplified by the Socialist Popular Front of Léon Blum, who had served in 1936–1937 as France’s first Jewish prime minister. Or so it was charged. Albert Lebrun, the ineffectual president of the Third Republic, ceded power to Pétain without resigning. And in a sharp right-hand turn, the Assembly empowered the marshal to impose a new constitution by personal order. That evening, this man who had started his life as the son of a farmer and rose to glory in old age issued three sweeping decrees that anointed him chief of state, granted him total control, and adjourned the National Assembly indefinitely.

  Like a strict but well-meaning grandfather, Pétain would impose discipline on a nation of unruly children led astray by questionable friends and now brought to heel with a new set of goals. Liberty, equality, fraternity—the old trinity of democratic France’s soaring ideals—gave way to a new triumvirate—work, family, homeland—that Gaullists would mock as already a failure. Its status, they said, amounted to this: “work: unobtainable; family: dispersed; homeland: humiliated.” It fell to the Germans, with Pétain as their front man and doddering puppet, to secure the foundations of a demoralized, bitter, and teetering France. The answer they found was totalitarianism.

  Pétain’s Révolution Nationale lumped together Jews, Communists, Freemasons, and the influences of laziness, drink, and egoism as responsible for the fall of France. (photo credit 9.1)

  In the third week of August, almost a month after Moïse Lévy attended the meeting in Vichy, black-booted German soldiers barged into the fine yellow mansion of Gray’s former mayor across the street from the promenade des Tilleuls. He needed no explanation when the Wehrmacht officers brushed him aside and without invitation rudely proceeded to tour all the rooms, jotting down notes on their tasteful appointments. Then he received an order in writing: he had twenty-four hours to give up his home, fully furnished and outfitted with all its linens, dishes, and silver. The next day, as men in the park met to play boules, city firemen pulled a red truck in front of the house to help Monsieur Lévy remove those personal items he was permitted. But only when the Germans arrived, prepared to add pressure, did he come out the door, ashen and feeble, leaning on the arm of an aide, while tearful townspeople gathered to watch him depart.

  Mayor Möise Lévy’s familial home at no 1 de la Grand Rue was confiscated by the Germans and turned into a residence for Wehrmacht officers. (photo credit 9.2)

  Throughout September, remaining in town in stopgap lodgings though relieved of his duties, he would frequently visit town hall to keep up with events. In early October he would move to Paris, occasionally sending contributions to Gray for his pet social projects. But he would never again return to his birthplace except to be buried in Gray’s Jewish cemetery—a locked enclave on the outskirts of town, where visitors only rarely seek entry to add a small stone to the now ill-tended grave sites as custom prescribes, as a tangible token of eternal remembrance.

  Near a wall sprouting patches of lichen and moss, the Lévys’ imposing family tomb records in marble Moïse’s many achievements: Sénateur-Maire de Gray, Vice-Président du Conseil Général de la Haute-Saône, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, and Commandant de Mérite Social. It also includes a memorial to his son, René Baruch Lévy, a chemist who was thirty-six in 1943, when he was deported to a Nazi death camp, seven months prior to the death of the mayor.

  “Assassiné par les Allemands au camp de Birkenau,” is engraved on the shiny gray stone to remember René Lévy’s murder at the hands of the Nazis. “Mort pour la France!” Dead for France! The same words are also inscribed on a monument that lists him among twenty-three other Jewish Graylois deported to death camps, all lacking graves. An Yvonne and a Lucie, a Marcel and a Louis, a Paulette, a Clarisse—all dead at Auschwitz, all of them honored as dying for France, not victims but martyrs ennobled through sacrifice, as if willingly made in the name of their country.

  As for the mayor, there could never be recompense for the loss of a son. Yet there was something a lifelong politician might well have enjoyed: a permanent place in the minds of some of Gray’s people—the last who remember or the few who may ask—through a street named in his honor after the war.

  In the first months of occupation, the Günzburgers fared better than had Mayor Lévy, because even with one thousand Germans ensconced now in Gray, no one attempted to oust them from their apartment. What made this doubly surprising was that their interim home at 12 rue Victor Hugo was just a few steps away from the headquarters the Nazis established at number 8, where a swastika menaced the street on a Wehrmacht flag above the front door. And more astonishing still was that they not only managed to live undisturbed by their Wehrmacht neighbors, but that a German lieutenant was actually billeted in their apartment! Far from becoming a threatening presence, however, the officer who moved in with them, taking the smallest bedroom close to the kitchen, behaved in a manner polite and considerate. On that point, they all granted him sincere credit. He arrived late in the evening, left in the morning, asked no questions, created no trouble and, to the contrary, often brought them small gifts of food from the Germans’ canteen, richly stocked with all the provisions the victors withheld from the average French table: a little meat, sugar, or butter and the treat of fresh bread unta
inted by petrol. He even told Janine, when he caught her admiring his bicycle at the foot of the stairs, that he would keep his eye out to find her one too.

  At such close quarters, the family could readily see there was no way of hiding the facts they were Germans and Jewish. Yet the dilemma of how to deal with a German officer under their roof was awkward at best and inherently frightening. Was their courteous boarder a fellow German who might at one time have been a friendly acquaintance, a schoolmate, a neighbor, or a customer’s son? Or a Nazi who held their lives in his hands, because with only a word he could have them deported?

  For Bella there was nothing confusing about how to regard the Wehrmacht troops who marched past their windows each morning that summer en route to swim in the chilly Saône River. Bare chested, wearing only trunks and shoes, the soldiers paraded their hard-muscled bodies before the townspeople. They invaded the streets in confident ranks, singing “Erika” or “Heidi-Heido” robustly in German—warriors embodying Hitler’s Aryan ideal. In response, Aunt Marie’s housekeeper daily rushed to the windows and yanked closed the tall shutters facing the street, deploring the sight of these vainglorious men as an inappropriate spectacle from which Janine and Trudi and all decent women ought to be shielded.

  At the river themselves, the girls tried to ignore the young German soldiers who showed up in their off-duty hours to relax in the sun. Afraid to seem rude, they found it hard not to reply when directly addressed, yet they refrained from any friendly response that could suggest they were willing to carry things further. Fraternizing with the enemy would not be viewed kindly and represented even more risk for girls who were Jewish.